Water Scarcity In The Sahel

Water Scarcity In The Sahel


Sitting on the shores of Lake Debo, the vast body of water at the heart of the River Niger's inland delta, the Malian village of Guidio seems well positioned to withstand the effects of drought. Unlike many other villages in the Sahel, the semi-arid region flanking the Sahara, it has an apparently plentiful supply of water on hand to raise crops and a back up if the drinking wells run dry.


Yet for Guidio's inhabitants, water is now becoming a daily concern. "Before we had enough rain and we could grow anything," says Moussa Guindo, a farmer who has lived in Guidio all his life. He gestures to the dusty ground. "When I was a child, where we're sitting was in the river. Now look: it's the middle of the village. Sometimes the rain starts, but then it doesn't last and the places where we used to be able to grow we can't anymore."


Guidio is a microcosm of the problems being felt up and down the Niger. West Africa's great waterway is a lifeline for an estimated 110 million people who rely on its annual floods to cultivate crops and raise cattle. But as the example of Guidio illustrates, the river is also fickle, and there are signs that growing human exploitation and an increasingly volatile climate are putting its future as a sustainable resource under serious threat.


Certainly, recent history suggests a grim future for those who depend on the Niger. Since the 1970s, with a few exceptional years, the region has been in the grip of a drought. Figures collated by conservation body the IUCN suggest rainfall in some parts of the Sahel have decreased by as much as 30% since the early 70s, with dramatic effects on river levels. Separate research by the Niger Basin Authority (NBA), the international body set up to manage the river's resources, shows that at Koulikoro, a town upstream from the Inland Delta, the river's flow over each of the three decades between 1970 and 2000 was on average 25% below the daily norm.


With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicting that temperatures in the Sahel could rise by up to 0.5 degrees every decade, it would be easy to conclude that the trends of the past 30 years can only continue. But according to Jamie Skinner, a water expert with the International Institute for Environment and Development, climatologists have yet to predict with any certainty future rainfall patterns in the Sahel.


The only thing anyone can agree on is more variability," Skinner says. "There's a massive effort underway to devise a better model for studying Sahelian weather systems, but the reality is that no one really understands the West African monsoon."




Water And Land In The Sahel

Overuse of water, wasteful practices, overpopulation, and multinational inteference in agriculture have all lent to the drought being experienced in this area of Africa as well as climate change. Have we reached a tipping point in Africa? Can we stop the multi nationals such as Monsanto that seek to force GMOs on Africa to continue to kill biodiversity? This is now happening in too many places throughout the world to simply just be cyclical or coincidence.

Acute Water Scarcity At Wettest Place On Earth

Acute water scarcity at wettest place on Earth

Meghalaya India, the wettest place on Earth is now known as a wet desert due to water scarcity. Has climate change also now even reached the most hidden pristine parts of our world?

From the article:

Nothing can be more ironical: despite being the wettest place on earth Cherrapunjee is suffering from acute water scarcity, earning for itself the epithet wet desert. And now the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) is assisting the Meghalaya government to go into the causes of the scarcity, especially during the lean period.

The study will include technical assessments on the status of river catchments in Meghalaya and social and institutional analysis of the forces that have led to the shortage of water, says Jevon Harding of TERI. TERI will assist the Rain Water Harvesting Mission, formed by the state government, to combat the shortage of surface water. One of the components of the study will be to come up with a strategy of rainwater harvesting. Cherrapunjee receives about 12000 mm rainfall annually, but the residents face severe crisis of surface water specially during the lean season when rainfall is sometimes nil. Women and children trudging uphill with water-filled clay-pots on their backs from deep gorges is a common sight in Cherrapunjee today. The perennial springs gushing out abundant water are also now on the verge of drying up due to random large-scale destruction of forests.

Environmentalist Naba Bhattacharjee said, It-s a false notion that high rainfall will ensure perennial water supply for infinity. Only 0.0007 per cent of the world-s total water is potable and which is on decline due to change in rainfall pattern and inadequate precipitation due to global warming and climate change. He, however, emphasized on revival of traditional rain water storage systems supplemented by improved modern technology suitable for hilly the terrain. Emphasizing on equitable distribution of water among people, anthropologist Nitish Jha of the TERI said, There is no physical crisis of water in Meghalaya, but there is an economic scarcity of water only in Cherrapunjee (now called Sohra), which receives the highest rainfall in the world.

Jha said that the TERI would venture into an extensive survey over a period of one year to ascertain the cause of water crisis in Shillong and Sohra and subsequently come out with a detailed project report on tackling the situation through effective management and conservation measures. snipJha pointed out that the peculiar land tenure system prevalent in the State coupled with the menace of unscientific coal mining and stone quarrying have depleted water levels in the perennial catchments of the state.

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Unscientific Coal Mining Affecting Meghalaya Environment

It is truly heartbreaking to see this happening to one of the last pristine places on Earth. It is totally inhumane. Population will increase while the availability of freshwater declines due to such practices which toxify the land and water. Add to that the effects of climate change in this area as far as erratic rainfall patterns, species extinction, and invasive species as well as the spread of diseases and we are looking at an environmental catatrophe where there should have been none. What is it about so many in the human species who still cannot connect these dots? To think that even there natural biodiversity cannot be respected is dark news indeed. Governments are totally irresponsible in their actions as well. They hurt the very people they are supposed to be helping.

Tibetan Glaciers Melting Rapidly

Tibetan Glaciers Melting Rapidly

Glaciers high in the Himalayas are dwindling faster than anyone thought, putting nearly a billion people living in South Asia in peril of losing their water supply.

Throughout India, China, and Nepal, some 15,000 glaciers speckle the Tibetan Plateau. There, perched in thin, frigid air up to 7200 metres above sea level, the ice might seem secluded from the effects of global warming.

But just the opposite is proving true, according to new research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Professor Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and a team of researchers travelled to central Himalayas in 2006 to study the Naimona'nyi glacier, expecting to find some melting.

Mountain glaciers have been receding all over the world since the 1990s and there was no reason this one, which provides water to the mighty, Indus, and Brahmaputra Rivers, should be any different.

But when the team analysed samples of glacier, what they found stunned them.

Radioactive signals

Glaciers can be dated by looking for traces of radioactivity buried in the ice. These are the leftovers from US and Soviet atomic bomb testing in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the Naimona'nyi samples, there was no sign of the tests. In fact, the glacier had melted so much that the exposed surface of the glacier dated to 1944.

"We were very surprised not to find the 1962-1963 horizon, and even more surprised not to find the 1951-1952 signal," says Thompson.

In more than twenty years of sampling glaciers all over the world, this was the first time both markers were missing.

He suspects the reason for this is that high-altitude glaciers, despite residing in colder temperatures, are more sensitive to climate change.

As more heat is trapped in the atmosphere, he said, it holds more water vapour. And when the water vapour rises to high altitudes it condenses, releasing the heat into the upper atmosphere, where high mountain landscapes feel the brunt of warming.

"At the highest elevations, we're seeing something like an average of 0.3°C warming per decade," says Thompson. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects 3°C of warming by 2100. But that's at the surface; up at the elevations where these glaciers are there could be almost twice as much, almost 6°C."

"I have not seen much as compelling as this to demonstrate how some glaciers are just being decapitated," says Associate Professor Shawn Marshall of the University of Calgary.

snip

The finding has ominous implications for the hundreds of millions of people who depend on the waters of the Naimona'nyi and other glaciers for their livelihoods. Across the region, no one know just how much water the Himalayas have left, but Thompson says it's dwindling fast.

"You can think of glaciers kind of like water towers," he says. "They collect water from the monsoon in the wet season, and release it in the dry season. But how effective they are depends on how much water is in the towers."
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In a world where it warms by three degrees, we will see this beginning to happen more rapidly. The world based on current global climate events is now between two and a half and three degrees. The burning of fossil fuels which has now been scientifically linked to the exacerbation of climate change must be drastically cut within the next ten years to avoid a climate catastrophe. It is unimaginable to picture a world where we reach four degrees or above. In such a world the planet we call our home would be unrecognizable and our lives would change forever. War over water will be commonplace, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees would be seeking higher ground from Bangladesh and other low lying areas due to sea rise, which is already making itself known in these areas.

And it is not as if people in this world are not aware of what we are experiencing. Yet, we continue to waste water, mismanage it, and elect people to represent us who do not take the issue of water management and conservation seriously. We will rue the day we acted so cavalierly regarding this most precious resource. The glaciers of the Himalayas are only one of many glacier chains across the world losing mass more rapidly than even the IPCC predicted. We cannot as a species continue to be distracted by diversions while our world melts around us. We are on a collision course with our destiny. It is absolute arrogance to think we are omnipotant over nature and that we have no responsibility for our actions. To tempt fate due to apathy is to tempt our own demise.

Half The World Faces Water Shortage By 2080

Half The World Faces Water Shortage By 2080

Half the world's population could face a shortage of clean water by 2080 because of climate change, experts warned Tuesday.

Wong Poh Poh, a professor at the National University of Singapore, told a regional conference that global warming was disrupting water flow patterns and increasing the severity of floods, droughts and storms — all of which reduce the availability of drinking water.

Wong said the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that as many as 2 billion people won't have sufficient access to clean water by 2050. That figure is expected to rise to 3.2 billion by 2080 — nearly tripling the number who now do without it.

Reduced access to clean water — which refers to water that can be used for drinking, bathing or cooking — forces many villagers in poor countries to walk miles to reach supplies. Others, including those living in urban shanties, suffer from diseases caused by drinking from unclean sources.

At the beginning of the decade, the World Health Organization estimated that 1.1 billion people did not have sufficient access to clean water.

Asia, home to more than 4 billion people, is the most vulnerable region, especially India and China, where booming populations have placed tremendous stress on water sources, said Wong, a member of the U.N. panel.

"In Asia, water distribution is uneven and large areas are under water stress. Climate change is going to exacerbate this scarcity," he told the two-day Asia Pacific Regional Water Conference attended by policy makers, government officials, academics, businessmen and consumer group representatives.

Scientists have said global climate change takes many forms, causing droughts in some areas while increasing flooding and the severity of cyclones in others. Droughts reduce water supply, and floods destroy the quality of water. Rising sea levels, for instance, increase the salt content at the mouths of many rivers, from which many Asians draw their drinking water.

"As human civilization develops, the environment is increasingly affected in negative ways. Floods, drought, changing rainfall patterns and rising temperatures are signs of our misdeeds to nature," said Rozali Ismail, head of a state water association in Malaysia.
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And that half world will be looking for clean water sources from those areas that may remain that have water. This is a recipe for disaster. How can humans see the impending disaster before their eyes and continue to not do enough to reverse it? What stops us from doing the morally right thing? Even though we know there is enough water in this world to stave off the thirst that kills, we will continue to allow multi national corporations to steal it and sell it for exhorbitant prices that the poor of this world cannot afford. We will continue to spew GHG pollution into the atmosphere at a rate of 70 million tons a day thus exacerbating drought, glacier melt, and erratic weather patterns.

We will continue to allow governments working in tandem with global organizations fix prices that are out of the realm of reality in order to exacerbate war and suffering because it keeps them profitable and in power. We will continue to allow mismanagement of funds on every level that could be used to fix and build infrastructure. We will continue to pollute and waste the very source of life we need to sustain us.

Or will we? Will it have to get this bad before we reach our epiphany as a species? Will we then see how much a part we are in the solutions to this crisis? We all have hands. We all have feet. We all have voices. We all have consciences. We need to use them all now to prove the title of this article wrong. I fear if we do not we are setting up the human species for its own extinction.

World Toilet Day

From Water Partners International:

Yes! You CAN change someone’s life with a toilet

It is no joke. Today we celebrate World Toilet Day and the incredible value of the can. Call it what you will – the pot, the loo, the throne, the latrine, the water closet, the bog – it’s one of the most important inventions in history.

Why recognize World Toilet Day? Because the majority of illness in the world is caused by fecal matter. Because 2.5 billion people, 42 percent of the world’s population, don’t have access to proper sanitation. Because 1.2 billion people have no toilet, no hole in the ground, no pit latrine – nothing. And because 1.8 million children die each year from diarrhea alone – 4,900 deaths each day.

What would you do without a toilet? In the Kibera slum in Nairobi, people defecate in plastic bags, which they throw on the roof of moving trains, in order to keep the waste out of their community. In Atabaha, Bangladesh, people relieve themselves in fields – the same fields that grow their food. In Dasra, Ethiopia, community members use a nearby river, which also serves as their source of water.

“This is not only about public health, it is also about dignity,” said Gary White, executive director of WaterPartners. “Can you imagine not having a safe place to go to the bathroom each day? World Toilet Day is an opportunity for us to call attention to this vast, solvable crisis, and invite us to act.”

By donating only $30 to WaterPartners, you can fund a toilet for someone in need in a developing country. Together, we CAN end this crisis.

Toilet Facts
One-third of all Americans flush the toilet while they are still sitting on it.

An average person visits the toilet 2,500 times a year, about 6-8 times a day. This adds up to three years of your life.

40,000 Americans are injured by toilets each year.

The first toilet ever seen on television was on “Leave It To Beaver.”

Car steering wheels carry more than twice as many germs as a toilet seat.

Urine on the toilet seat - although disgusting, it is a nearly sterile liquid.

In Florida, a 7th grade student recently won a school science fair by proving there was more bacteria in ice machines at fast-food restaurants than in toilet bowl water in the United States.

Contrary to popular lore, Thomas Crapper didn’t invent the toilet. Seated toilets with drainage systems date back to 2500 B.C. The flush toilet was invented in 1596 by John Harrington.

See pictures taken by WaterPartners of toilets around the world.

About World Toilet Day

Lack of safe sanitation has been called a silent crisis, a scandal of human indignity, and the number one enemy of world health. This is why the international community recognizes World Toilet Day every Nov. 19, and the United Nations deemed 2008 the International Year of Sanitation. One of the Millennium Development Goal’s (MGD) set in 2002 is to halve the number of those without access to basic sanitation by 2015.

Farmers In California Feeling Effects Of Drought

Farmers In California Feeling Effects Of Drought

Water restrictions, higher prices, and wildfires that are more ferocious brought on by climate change are changing the landscape of California and the lives of those who have farmed there for decades.Is California another Australia in the making?

Rancho Water to me is wrong to charge what they are charging and taking advantage of the drought to make more money. But also, farmers then need to learn to conserve water and cut down on the crops they grow that use much water. Unfortunately, having to pay more for the water may eventually help them get to that point.

Conservation is the key.

From the article:

Farmers served by the Rancho California Water District will pay more for water. It's just a question of when.

A program that allowed farmers to get cheaper water in exchange for agreeing to cutbacks in supplies in drier times could be phased out by 2013. That means farmers used to getting discounted water for crops will pay the same as the district's household and industrial customers.

That, combined with higher fuel and fertilizer costs and cheaper foreign goods, is the last thing local farmers need, said Ben Drake, a district board member who runs a farm management company.

"I may not be able to farm in the next eight to 10 years," said Drake, who has been in the Temecula Valley since the 1970s.

"None of my clients are spending any extra money on anything."

For years, many Rancho Water farmers received discounted water through the Metropolitan Water District's Interim Agricultural Water Program. Metropolitan wholesales water to Rancho, and its program gave farmers a lower rate in exchange for being first on the chopping block for supply cuts.

The program relies on surplus water; right now, there is none and Metropolitan doesn't expect to have a surplus in the next few years, said Rancho spokeswoman Meggan Reed.

About 1,700 customers take part in the program. About 48 percent of the water sold by Rancho Water goes to agriculture.

With a long-term drought and a court decision cutting supplies from the Sacramento River Delta, Metropolitan, which supplies 70 percent of the Rancho district's water, announced last year a 30 percent cut in water supplied to program participants.

Rancho Water had little choice but to pass along the cuts to farmers. To take the sting out of the cutbacks, district staff worked with farmers to find more ways to conserve water. Now, with the program gone by 2013, the district is giving farmers a chance to opt out now and pay the same rate as regular customers.

Program participants pay 65 cents per hundred cubic feet or 88 cents per hundred cubic feet, depending on where they are. With the program's demise, those customers would pay either 72 cents per hundred cubic feet or $1.88 per hundred cubic feet.

Those who opt out -- the deadline is Jan. 1 to opt out for next year -- will not be subject to the 30 percent cutback, although they face much higher charges if they exceed their water allowance.

Gene Bianchi, of De Luz, said he's not sure whether he'll opt out of the program.

Bianchi has about 1,100 avocado trees on his 12-acre parcel. He says he is spending about $11,000 to $12,000 annually on water.

Also see:



Wildfires Ravage Southern California

Drought brings wildfires, and climate change along with human waste brings drought. It is a vicious cycle that can only be broken when humans see their hand in this.

Drought Monitor-California

The entire area of California currently experiencing these devastating fires is also experiencing moderate to severe drought which only adds to its ferocity.

Protest Over Water Privitization In Mali Turns Deadly

One dead five hurt at protest against privitization of water in Mali

Protesters march behind police with a banner reading 'hunger justifies the means' in central Bamako in April 2008 during a demonstration. One person died and five were injured Monday when security forces opened fire on a protest over plans to privatise drinking water distribution in northwestern Mali, hospital and official sources said. Photo courtesy AFP.


And so it begins.

Water Report On Mali

The people of Mali have reason to protest.

Drought to make land worldwide uninhabitable

Drought land 'will be abandoned'

Parts of the world may have to be abandoned because severe water shortages will leave them uninhabitable, the United Nations environment chief has warned.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said water shortages caused by over-use of rivers and aquifers were already leading to serious problems, even in rich nations. With climate change expected to reduce rainfall in some places and cause droughts in others, some regions could become 'economic deserts', unviable for people or agriculture, he said.

Steiner argued that only urgent action to combat global warming and poverty could prevent the creation of thousands of 'environmental refugees'. Previous UN agreements to reduce global warming emissions and the Millennium Development Goals on poverty had not been met. His warning echoes those of other environment leaders, who have said that water shortages could be the greatest threat posed by climate change.

'In many ways [water] is the most dramatic expression of mismanagement of natural or nature-based assets,' Steiner said. 'The day a person or a community is bereft of water is the day that your chance of even the most basic life or livelihood is gone and economic activity seeps away.

'Unchecked climate change will mean that some parts of the world will simply not have enough water to sustain settlements both small and large, because agriculture becomes untenable and industries relying on water can no longer compete or function effectively. This will trigger structural changes in economies right through to the displacement of people as environmental refugees.'

Steiner said it was not possible to identify specific places at risk, but said vulnerable areas were those which were already considered to be 'water scarce' because of dry weather and a lack of infrastructure to store and transport water. Last week a study of the water footprints of 200 nations led by conservation group WWF warned that 50 countries were already experiencing 'moderate to severe water stress on a year-round basis'.

This week experts from the UN Convention to Combat Desertification meeting in Turkey will warn that high food prices and endemic droughts are jeopardising the lives of hundreds of millions of people, particularly in Africa.

Some of the most dramatic examples of water shortages this year include conflict-stricken Sudan, the dramatic drying of Lake Faguibine in Mali on which 200,000 mostly nomadic people depend, fatal clashes over drying boreholes in northern Kenya, and economic and social crisis on the sparsely populated border between Bolivia and Argentina, according to Unep. Oxfam has estimated that 25 million people have been affected by the most recent drought in Ethiopia.

Rich nations are not immune. California has declared a state of emergency over water shortages, Australia has committed billions of dollars to cope with drought, and governments in Europe have been forced to ship in water to stop communities running dry.

'A plant, never mind a human being, simply cannot live without water,' said Steiner. 'It's not a matter of how we can live for three years without some water; these are not the kind of things we can do for a while and recover.
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I weep for humanity and the Earth. And I don't mean that figuratively. For those of us who know the inmportance of the connection to this Earth and especially to the water that is the lifeblood of this planet, reading about these events unfolding and knowing that the human spirit can reverse it if it wants to but chooses not to out of some sort of denial, apathy, or other emotion over reason that does not place water as the priority it should be truly leaves me empty inside.

This is not only hurting us and other species. This is a clear statement of the character of humanity as a whole and our total loss of respect for a planet that is not only our only home but the one place that has given us everything we need to survive. However, we have decided not to respect those gifts as so many civilizations and cultures before us have and some still do. We think we know it all... we have all the answers... we are so superior to the Earth and think its resources are only here for our pleasure.

How many deaths due to drought will it take to see the truth? How much famine? How much displacement? How much war? What kind of world are we making for our children? How can we make it better? These are the questions we must ask and answer with a positive reply. I simply just don't know how many more years people can afford to simply ask the questions without them being answered.

We have set this all in motion and then we walk away? What does that say about humanity? Will it truly take a revolution to bring this world to its senses?