m@ fredenblog

Recent conversations about water conservation (and a current project at work) recently prompted me to e-mail my hydrogeologist friend in Australia.

“Australia – the land of fresh water shortage. Hence my career! So, the answer is that the problem (or potential problem) is specific to certain countries including Australia. We have the lowest precipitation of any continent except Antarctica. The NE of the US has heaps, the SW not so much obviously. With the predicted warming through accelerated climate change (you’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth, right?) the main world-wide ocean currents get screwed up (as in the El Nino/La Nina cycle) which changes worldwide weather patterns. Climate change modelling has predicted more rainfall in some parts of the world and less in other parts, including Australia. Also, the ever-expanding world population will want more and more water. Water is only a renewable resource is we use an amount less than rainfall. And even then, the water we use is taken from the environment. Most of Australia has been in drought for the last ten years and so the amount of water stored has gone down massively.”

“Many people in the world already suffer from major shortages of fresh water due to a multitude of reasons, including uncontrolled development, drought, poverty (ie no money to build infrastructure for water storage, treatment and distribution), over-use of the resource (eg the Rio Grande has all the water taken out of it and doesn’t flow across the Mexican border any more) etc etc. Desalination (which is expensive, uses heaps of electricity and leaves you with a really concentrated brine which is hard to get rid of) is already used to supply drinking water in many semi-arid countries like Dubai and Malta. There is at least one desalination plant going to be built in Australia as well.

Essentially, water is only a renewable resource if you already have shitloads of it!”

That’s pretty much the idea I had, but it was nice to get clarification (and a couple of visuals). Thanks, Elissa!

One of my current projects is the redesign of a Geography and Environment departmental website. I’ve found a lot of great images, which has definitely piqued my interest in global environmental issues.