Thank you very much. I don't know where that
came from, but thanks a lot. Good afternoon
. My name is Bill Hopkins. Uh I am
a professor in the department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation
here at Virginia Tech and I also have the pleasure
of directing the Global Change Center at the university.
I'd like to welcome everyone to another installment of our
Global Change Center distinguished lecture series. Uh, these
are public events and as you know, I saw
a lot of familiar faces, which makes me happy
to see that we have people coming back means we're
doing something right. I hope uh, these events
are one of a number of things that we try
to do to engage the community on issues that we
find to be of great societal importance. And it's
wonderful to see such a strong turnout again. Today's
talk will focus on one of the most important challenges
facing humanity today. How do we protect dwindling freshwater
resources so that both society and healthy ecosystems, the
ecosystems that we depend on for our own survival can
simultaneously thrive. We're very fortunate to have bryan Richter
, one of the world's foremost authorities on these complex
water issues with us here on campus for a couple
of days as well as this afternoon. Before we
get started. I want to thank some of our
key um, folks that made this event possible first
and foremost, the frail and Life Science Institute frail
in uh, is our home on campus, their
academic home and they provide a great deal of our
funding, the Virginia Tech Graduate School who funds our
interfaces of global change, uh, interdisciplinary graduate education
program, which is within the center. Uh,
both of these frail in as well as the graduate
school. We couldn't do anything that we do,
including these sorts of events without their support. And
our key partner on this specific event today is the
Virginia Water Resources Research Center. Also known, that's
what the shout out was for. It wasn't for
me, it was for the Water Center. The
Water Center led by dr steven Schoenholtz will introduce in
just a moment. I also want to thank the
frail in life sciences uh staff and in particular,
I want to thank Gloria Schoenholtz for handling all the
logistics for this event, as well as all as
well as all of the events that we hold and
last and last, and certainly not least. And
we better get a lot of these hoops and hollers
for this one. I want to thank the Lyric
Theatre. Uh this has been an amazing partnership.
Yes. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. It's been
an amazing partnership for the last couple of years,
and I'm really looking forward to continuing this. It's
a it's a wonderful venue for us to talk about
these sorts of important issues. Uh, so one
more time, let's thank the lyric and let's thank
everybody that's been helping out with these efforts. Yeah
. And speaking of the lyric and these free public
events, just a shout out for next Wednesday,
right here, seven PM will be airing a free
film. It's a private screening of the film Between
Earth and Sky. It's a film that's going to
be airing on PBS. This is a pre screening
of that, And it's a good one. cinematography
is fantastic, the contents a little bit dark.
We're gonna be talking about climate change. Um,
but I think it's an important film for folks to
come out for. Uh, and it also deals
with some of the environmental injustices associated with climate change
. So try to come out and just as an
enticement, we're gonna have a lot of free popcorn
for students when you get here, two quick housekeeping
items. There will be uh, time for questions
and answers right at the end, we'll have a
microphone. This microphone will be down here and I
asked that you come up one at a time to
ask questions and for some reason you can't come up
, flag me down or Stephen down, and we'll
bring you the microphone. And I ask that you
just be respectful of people's time, ask one question
so that we can have other people have an opportunity
to engage. We'll end promptly at 5 15 steve
. Uh brian's books are actually for sale out in
the lobby there also at our bookstore, and he'll
be sticking around for about 30 minutes for a book
signing. So please stop by, say hello and
get your book signed. Okay, so now it's
my pleasure today to introduce our partner on this event
, Dr steven schoenholtz and the Water center. Dr
Schoenholtz, uh, as I mentioned, is the
director of the water center, which is one of
50 for water resource programs around the country that were
established by Congress in the 1960s and are funded to
the Department of Interior. The Water center is housed
within the College of Natural Resources and Environment, one
of the premier natural resource programs in the nation.
Virginia Tech is extremely fortunate to be the home of
the Water center for the commonwealth and also to have
dr schoenholtz at the helm of the center for the
last 10 years under his leadership. Over the last
decade, the water center has been instrumental and raising
the statue of Virginia Tech as an international leader and
water resource research and education, both at the graduate
as well as undergraduate levels. Dr schoenholtz has helped
attract some of the best and brightest water faculty to
Virginia Tech. He's helped spearhead the nation's first undergraduate
degree in Water. Yes, you can come to
Virginia Tech and get a Bachelor's of Science and Water
, which I just think it's cool. He's been
very actively engaged in interdisciplinary graduate studies of water across
campus, as well as with our graduate education program
and for fostering across campus vision and collegial atmosphere for
advancing studies of water campus-wide. It is my pleasure
to introduce my trusted colleague and very dear friend Dr
steven Schoenholtz. No, thank you Bill. Uh
those are very kind remarks. Uh it's a pleasure
to work closely with Bill uh and our colleagues at
the Global Change Center in bringing together events like this
and certainly in promoting water education, research and outreach
here at Virginia Tech. Through many collaborate efforts along
with this. We do a lot of other collaborative
collaborative efforts. I'd also like to second bills appreciation
or expression of appreciation to those who really make these
events possible. Again, the frail and Life Science
Institute, the grad school and certainly the lyric Theatre
who does this for free for us. So that's
really supportive and very helpful. So in terms of
the Virginia Water Resources Research Center, uh, it's
a pleasure to co sponsor events like this. Uh
, it's certainly a pleasure to have bryan Richter visit
campus and be this afternoon's distinguished lecture in this series
. As bill said, the water center was established
back in 1965 here at Virginia Tech and its mission
is to facilitate uh outreach engagement and education through programmatic
efforts to solve water challenges throughout the state, throughout
the region and throughout the country and also globally.
So we have a very coherent mission that lines up
with Virginia tech research, teaching and outreach with regards
to water. So as part of the mission of
the water center, uh we coordinated and developed an
undergraduate degree that Bill mentioned uh an interdisciplinary interdisciplinary degree
on water resources policy and management. And uh it's
the first of its kind in the U. S
. And we already have, it started two years
ago, we're not even done with our second year
, we already have 50 students in the program,
so we're very pleased with how that's starting in developing
the program several years ago. Uh One of the
first things we wanted to do was get in touch
with some of the leading water experts around the country
and one of the first people eye contact. It
was brian Richter to take a look at the curriculum
. Uh invite people like brian to give us some
feedback on what they thought of the curriculum. And
uh he was wonderful and wrote a very supportive letter
and I'd like to share just a few items from
that letter with you, Which I use frequently when
I go around the country and talk about this degree
. These are words from Brian Uh, from 2014
. The timing of this new program could not be
better nor more urgent As I write this letter.
And this was written, I believe in June of
2014 drought and associated water shortages are wrecking havoc with
the economies of California Texas and other Western states and
internationally to offer. But one example, and this
is really touching right now, severe water shortages in
Syria, water shortages in Syria drove the farmers from
rural areas into the cities where social unrest ignited and
as we all know, is still ignited. These
calamities, which are certain to become more widespread and
intense in coming decades, are evidence of the great
need for higher education programs focused on water. The
nature of the problems in these water stressed regions further
suggests that these issues cannot be addressed from a single
disciplinary perspective. They must be understood from social political
economic engineering, environmental dimensions. Just to mention a
few of the dimensions we have to consider. The
pro proposed Virginia Tech program is designed to provide students
with the essential interdisciplinary education that will prepare students for
a challenging water future. I will close by adding
that I teach a course in water sustainability at the
University of Virginia. This is brian still speaking,
and I have long dreamed of my university taking a
program on such as this one being proposed by Virginia
Tech for the greater good of the world. I
am very happy that at least one Virginia University is
taking steps to tackle what is certain to be the
number one resource challenge of the 21st century. So
again, I thank you brian for that very supportive
letter. So brian Richter Has been a global leader
in water science and conservation for more than 25 years
actually and interacting with them over the past two days
. It's now 30 years as of this summer.
I believe he's a chief scientist for the global water
program with the nature Conservancy where he promotes sustainable water
use and management with governments, corporations and local communities
. Brian is also the president of sustainable waters and
NGO and a global water education organization. He's consulted
on more than 120 water projects worldwide and serves as
a water advisor to some of the world's largest corporations
investment banks and also to the United Nations. He's
a co author with Sandra pastel of rivers for life
, Managing water for people in nature. One of
the two books out in the lobby that he will
happily sign and his most recent book, I believe
, published in 2014 called Chasing Water A Guide for
Moving From scarcity to sustainability, has been published in
six languages already. So brian has also spent much
of the past two days here on campus, uh
, meeting with faculty Virginia, Tech, faculty,
undergraduate students, grad students. He's been very gracious
with his time over the last two days. In
fact, he even shared perspectives with my watershed management
assessment and policy class yesterday afternoon and I could tell
relative to my being in front of the students,
they were a little more engaged and lively with some
great questions. So thank you again brian for all
your help. So we will now share some of
his, he will now share some of his perspectives
with you. Please join me in welcoming brian Richter
to Virginia tech and to Blacksburg as he shares his
thoughts on chasing water and a rapidly changing world.
Welcome. Mm hmm. Thank you steve. Yeah
. Mhm. Well, thank you so much.
Stephen into bill into Gloria also for being some of
the warmest hosts I've ever experienced anywhere I've gone in
the world. So thank you very much. It's
a real pleasure to be here. And thanks to
all of you for coming out on a cold blustery
april afternoon. Um, and thanks in particular to
the students here, I gotta admit that when I
was your age on a friday afternoon at four o'clock
, I wouldn't have been in a lecture hall.
Um I would have been uh in search of a
keg or something like that. So um so thank
you and I hope that I can make your hour
with me worthwhile. And interesting. I'm gonna start
with a little bit of a historical perspective on this
problem that I'm talking about today. So as you
all know for most of human history, we behaved
as hunters and gatherers. And the hunting and gathering
was not just about in search of food, but
it was also for many, for many tribes and
many clans around the world, it was in search
of water as well. And particularly if you lived
in some of the dryer landscapes in places like Australia
, developing a mental map in developing an intergenerational story
about where these places were that you could find food
and water was a very, very important part of
your survival. And so not surprisingly, a lot
of these cultures developed with art and music and painting
um uh in calendars that were shaped by the seasonality
that had to do with what foods were available at
what times of the year. And also as evidenced
by the painting that continues to be done today in
the aboriginal communities of Australia, really revere ng um
and recording the locations of where they could find reliable
water, wetlands and springs and and floodplain, oxbow
lakes and things like that. So that was much
of our history. Um and that was the way
that our relationship with with water was for literally tens
of thousands of years, But then about 10-12,000 years
ago, in different pockets around the planet, our
relationship with water began to fundamentally change, and what
I mean by that is instead of going out in
search of water chasing water, if you will,
we decided to become sedentary, we've decided to settle
down, We learned how to, how to produce
crops, how to cultivate crops. And that changed
our relationship because then we became dependent upon the water
coming to us that we were settled in place and
that we were then become reliant upon that place,
what that place had to offer with respect to water
and all the vagaries in variability that comes with water
availability from month to month, season, the season
and year to year, and so a very,
very pivotal time in human history and changing our relationship
to water. At that point. Of course,
over time we advanced technologically, we learned a lot
of new engineering skills and we figured out how to
bolster that water that was available to us locally by
learning how to store it. And so we started
building reservoirs and the reservoirs got bigger and bigger.
And we finally built in the 1930s, this one
Hoover Dam that formed Lake Mead on the Colorado River
, built in 1930s, as I said, um
and it was really quite a remarkable engineering feat by
far and away. The biggest dam that had ever
been built on the planet up to that point,
but really really important to what we could do as
a civilization, what we could do as a people
, what we could do in terms of settlement of
the Western United States, because of course, the
Western United States um is much drier than this part
of the world and being able to store water that
comes to you if you will, something of a
surplus of water that comes during the winter season,
in the case of of this part of the world
, snowpack that falls on the Rocky Mountains and the
snow melted thin comes and being able to capture that
water and store it and to be able to use
it during the drier times a year when there's not
so much, water was a really, really key
to our survival and enabled us to do pretty remarkable
things and literally grow lettuce in the desert. So
this is Imperial Valley, Those of you who happen
to eat lettuce at this time of the year,
about 90% of all of american lettuce in the wintertime
comes out of this one irrigation district in southern California
called the Imperial Irrigation district and the Imperial irrigation district
would not exist were it not for hoover dam?
Um The water supply, most of the water supply
that's applied out here on these farm fields and it
literally year round. Um you know, literally four
growing seasons out here, that water comes out of
the Colorado River, captured and held in Hoover dam
and then transported out to all these farm fields.
So really enabled not only the expansion of water use
, but of course the food production associated with that
um as well as the other cities that grew up
in that part of the world. And of course
we also discovered that we could we could dig underground
and encounter water as well. And this is really
, really important parts of the world where you didn't
have much water on the surface, you didn't have
flowing streams, you didn't have lakes that you can
go and get water from. And so being able
to dig a well and get to it. And
of course we now have taken that to the extreme
, particularly with industrialized pumps, it became available after
World War Two. We were able to reach deeper
and deeper down into the earth, hundreds and even
thousands of feet to be able to get to ancient
water that's, that was deposited there back in the
last ice Age. Um and be able to to
have enough electricity and to have that technology of those
pumps to be able to bring that water up from
those great depths enable things to happen like the irrigated
agriculture that's taking place in the Ogallala aquifer in the
midwestern United States. That's where these crop circles come
from. These are center pivot sprinklers that are irrigating
move in a circular, the sprinklers move in a
circular fashion and create those crop circles. So over
time the expansion, the accumulation of water use,
particularly for irrigated agriculture, but also for urban use
and industrial use, um grew gradually over time,
particularly over the last century. And I'm showing you
two graphs here, and I could show you 1000
grafts that tell this very much this exact same story
. What I'm showing here of course, is,
over the course of time over the last century,
the two blue graph lines here represent the lighter blue
, is the water available um particularly think about that
, is the water flowing down the Colorado River,
The water flowing down what's called the Murray darling basin
in southeastern Australia. That's up on the upper graph
here and so from year to year, the water
is variable. Um, but uh, but at
the same time the water use the extraction of water
out of these water bodies and putting it on farms
and in cities and industries grew continuously and grew and
grew almost without restriction, almost without regulation. Um
, there was issuance of water rights, water entitlements
, legal documents that said how much water you could
use, but nobody was slowing down the process of
just handing those entitlements and those water rights to anybody
who asked for them. And so over time the
water use grew and as you can see then all
of a sudden those two lines of water available and
water consumed began to intersect In the Colorado. We
were getting close to that even back in the 1950s
took, which is on the bottom here in the
Murray Darling basin. It took a little bit longer
to get up against the limits of the available water
, but both of these places and again in thousands
of places around the world. I'll show you a
map in just a moment. Um this intersection between
water use hitting the absolute ceiling of the water available
. Now you see on the, on the bottom
graph here, the Colorado River, that there are
many moments, many years when the use of water
was actually greater than the water that was coming down
the Colorado River. The only reason that could happen
is because of those large reservoirs, because of Hoover
Dam, because of Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam
, which could store enormous volumes of water five times
or five years of the total flow of the Colorado
River can be captured and held by those two reservoirs
alone. That's immensely helpful, not only in getting
you through dry seasons, but getting you through dry
years, a series of dry years. Um but
even in these places, now that we're up against
the limits of the total water that's available and now
we've gone into a period in the Colorado River system
where We're having below average water coming down the Colorado
River. In fact, we're now in a span
of the last 15 years, has now been estimated
to be the driest 15 years in the last 1400
years. Um They're having some pretty dire consequences and
a lot of concern in the Colorado River system.
Out in the western United States. You notice around
the perimeter of the reservoir, that white band,
what we call the bathtub ring, that's an indication
of when this lake is full. When Lake mead
is full, you don't see that white band around
the lake. So the lake levels have dropped um
50 60 70 80 ft over the course of the
last 10 years, over the course of the last
decade. And there's great concerns about this because even
though this year, the Western US has been blessed
with really high rainfalls and really big snowpacks and that
lake level is going to come up modestly as a
result of that. There's there's nobody that knows anything
about water management or anything about climate and about water
use in the Western United States. That expects this
trend not to continue. So what that means is
that the lake level in Lake Mead is expected to
continue in the bureau reclamation will tell you this as
well, is expected to decline gradually over time.
It could actually accelerate because the climate scientists are telling
us that the water available, the water coming down
the Colorado River is expected to decrease By 20-30 in
the next few decades. So I showed you that
long term, 100 years of graph of how much
water is available and how much we're using. We're
already up against the limits. Now, think about
taking 20-30 of that water availability graph down. And
you can imagine what's going on. What's going to
happen is that each of the states that are dependent
upon the Colorado River will start to get cut off
. We came very close to hitting that water level
, at which Arizona gets cut off during the past
couple of years. Again, they're gonna get a
little bit of a respite here with the heavy snow
pack in the, in the heavy rain falls this
year. But we're looking at some pretty serious consequences
. And by the way, this damn not only
provides water supply, but it also generates a lot
of hydro power, a lot of electricity. And
when the lake levels get down to a certain point
, the turbines aren't able to operate as efficiently and
you can't generate as much electricity. And eventually the
lake will get to a point where you cannot generate
electricity at all using the hydro electric turbines. And
that has ramifications that will run throughout the Southwestern energy
grids. Um and uh these are things that get
talked about behind closed doors and and you know,
nervously over a beer among water experts working out in
the West. But they aren't things that the general
public is very well tuned into just yet. So
let me give you now a bit more of an
expanded view of what's going on around the world.
So This is an animation. It goes over time
as you can see it started 1900 and goes up
to pretty close to the president. This is based
on a global global water model, a global water
computer model. There are a number of research institutes
around the world that are trying to that have built
similar models. This one happens to come from the
University of Kassel in Germany and it's called Water gap
and Water gap. Basically what these models are trying
to do is to simulate how much water was available
and how much water got used for farming, for
urban use, for industrial use, for manufacturing.
They're keeping track of all of those water uses and
water availability year after year. Um and they're telling
us what the water accounts, what the water budgets
look like in the case of water gap in 100
and 50,000 different water basins around the world. So
very, very fine scaled spatial um information and modeling
this literally on a daily basis um and uh particularly
for irrigated agriculture. Now, the other thing you
see about this map about this animation from the label
down here is this isn't all water use, this
is only irrigated agriculture. And the reason for that
is because when you look at the places around the
planet that are running out of water that are up
against the limits like the Colorado and the Murray Darling
. And thousands of other basins that are in the
warm colors on this map. By the way,
the warm colors represent places where they're beyond 70 utilization
of the renewable water supply. So they're getting up
near the ceiling. Okay. Some of them are
hitting the ceiling on a continual basis, some of
them only hit it during certain months of the year
. Some of them only hit it during drier or
drought years. But if it's showing up is yellow
, orange or red on here, they're hitting the
limits and they're hitting it pretty regularly and pretty frequently
. And so the reason that this show is irrigated
agriculture only is that when we look at all of
these places around the world are in those warm colors
. On average, 90 of all the water being
consumed is going to growing food. It's going to
irrigated agriculture, About five goes to cities and about
five goes to industries and power generation. So when
we talk about water scarcity and this isn't true in
every single one of those, you know, those
red water basins up there, but the vast majority
of them, if you're to really understand what's going
on with water scarcity is you have to understand what's
going on with the use of irrigation to grow our
food and other crops that we depend upon. Okay
, so this is the full map. If you
put in all of the different water uses, the
map gets a little bit more colored. Um and
again, showing you that, you know, the
different degrees of going over the 75 line, there's
no magic. There's something that, that 75 is
so much subjective, but clearly anybody can feel and
know intuitively that if you're beyond using up three quarters
of the water of the renewable water supply, you're
probably getting pretty close to trouble. Right? So
these are the places in the world and these are
some of the statistics. This is from a paper
we put out actually published last year. Um,
So water shortages associated with this heavy utilization, heavy
dependence upon the available water supplies. Water shortages are
now happening at about a third of all of the
water basins in the world. Half of the world's
population is directly dependent upon those basins. And even
more frightening. Three quarters of all the irrigated agriculture
on the planet is dependent upon these basins. That
means that 30 of your food is being grown in
places that are up against the limits of the available
water supply. That's because about 40 of all the
food produced on the planet is produced using supplemental water
, irrigation water. The other 60 depends entirely Unrein
, they are able to grow crops just on rain
. And so if three quarters of all the irrigated
acreage is being is now in trouble, that means
about 30 of all of your food. um zooming
in a little bit closer and just giving you a
picture of the United States now. Um this is
a different model, but it's representing the same thing
. You can see the percentages of depletion over here
. If you're in the warm tones, you're up
against the limits of your available water supply. In
this case, the map is only for the summer
months, which are mostly the dry months across the
United States for the most part, but you can
see how red it is in the western part of
the country and particularly in California, But many other
the other states in the West. When you tell
you this up, this is actually when we did
this math a few years ago, I was quite
stunned by this. So half of all the western
rivers have lost more than half of their water during
the summertime, and a quarter of them have lost
three quarters of their water because of being extracted,
not being returned back to the rivers. Now,
what that means in places that have experienced that heavy
degree of depletion of the available water flow is that
these are fundamentally different ecosystems. Now, I want
you to understand that those of you that are in
studying environmental sciences, um environmental policy, uh you
know, we live, you know, in our
generation and we see rivers as they are today.
And, and it's it's hard to understand in these
rivers that have been so heavily depleted that we're looking
at a different river. I wrote recently. You
know, we think, I think about these as
being ghost rivers. Um, they're nothing like they
used to be, they don't harbor, they don't
support the same species, They don't function the way
that they used to. Um, and uh,
and that's, you know, that's part of part
of the issues that we're gonna, that we're having
to deal with now in the 21st century. Um
, one of the things that we did just last
year at the end of last year was we,
and we have never seen this done before. It
just seems like somebody would have tried to relate the
degree of utilization of the water resource. Too,
Bad things happening. So what I mean by bad
things happening is with a harness the, the intellectual
capacity of my students at UVA and over the last
couple, 23 years and they collected dot well documented
stories, well documented evidence of where something bad had
happened because they ran out of water. They didn't
have enough water to provide drinking water supply in Sao
Paulo brazil in rio de janeiro. Um they didn't
have enough water to grow crops in 2011 in Texas
. That's the picture from Texas in 2011. So
many of the crops didn't make it through the summer
growing season. Um, We had fish, we
have fish kills all around the world. We have
power plants that have to shut down because there's not
enough water in the river of the lake to be
able to, to run enough water through the power
plant to keep it cool enough and otherwise they would
literally have a meltdown. So these are the kinds
of bad things, these bad events, these water
shortage events that we were paying attention to and documenting
. And then we did, did some statistical relationships
to those places on the map where people are running
out of water. Not surprisingly, if you're living
on the edge, if you've pushed your water use
all the way up to the limits of the renewable
water supply, your likelihood of experiencing water shortage impacts
goes way up and it goes up very very quickly
. That's true. Also for the ecological systems for
the species of the planet, the ones that live
in these freshwater bodies very, very strong evidence that
you don't have to deplete a water body very far
. Going back to my story, about half the
water in the western rivers, in half of the
western rivers is now gone. That's why we're seeing
so many freshwater animals, plants and animals being becoming
very severely imperiled. One statistic here that still is
just almost hard to believe is, um, World
Wildlife Fund has been tracking thousands of populations of freshwater
plants and animals, well, all kinds of plants
and animals, marine animals, terrestrial animals, things
that live in the freshwater systems. And very frighteningly
they have seen an average decline in oceanic marine species
populations and in terrestrial species populations of about 40 declines
since 1970. It's over 80 for freshwater plants and
animals. And much of it is being driven by
the fact that we have, we have so heavily
utilized these water resources, so what we see in
different parts of the world. So in writing the
book chasing water, I had a chance to really
study how people were responding to water shortages. I
was of course looking for good stories. I will
share a couple of them with you here in just
a moment. But I really wanted to document and
understand how communities, how farmers had tried to deal
with running out of water over time. And what
happens is after you exhaust your local water supply,
you've dried up your river, you've pumped your groundwater
system down to where you can no longer economically reach
the water and pump it out of the ground.
One of the most common things that's happened is that
you then go looking for some more water in another
place. You build what's called water importation pipelines and
canals. This is one of the most ambitious and
gargantuan projects of that nature anywhere in the world.
This is called the South North Water diversion project.
It's in china and it takes water pulls water out
of the Yangtze River, positioned in the southern part
of the country and it runs it over 1000 kilometers
to the north, up to Beijing and other cities
, but also up to the north china plain,
which is china's breadbasket. It's the equivalent of the
midwestern United States for china. The new york times
ran a story about this diversion project and this is
the way that they helped to relate what's going on
here. This is like taking water out of the
Missouri River and to supply the water supply needs of
Washington, D. C, new york and boston
, That kind of distance in that kind of volume
of water and being done at great cost, about
$80 billion dollars on this. And this is only
the first phase of a three phase water diversion project
. Now, Another interesting fact, if you look
at all the major cities of the world, about
40 of their water supply comes from this kind of
a project, they exhausted their local water supply and
they ended up having to go to other places to
get it. The problem now in the 21st century
is that they're in many parts of the world and
particularly water scarce regions, there is no more surplus
water and communities are getting more and more protective about
having some other water users coming in and building a
pipe and taking their water away. They're concerned about
their water security, their water futures. And so
this is not going to be a viable proposition for
very much longer in most areas of the planet.
The other thing about water importation is that it's tremendously
energy intensive. It takes a tremendous amount of energy
to be able to move water. You can almost
never run it downhill, you know, with gravity
the entire way, so you've got to pump and
water is heavy and if you're pumping enormous volumes of
water, it's really, really energy. It requires
a great deal of electricity, which makes these water
transportation pipelines, some of the biggest electricity users on
the planet. And so California, the single biggest
electricity user in California, is the state water project
that moves water from northern California. Southern California,
the biggest electricity user in the state of Arizona is
a central Arizona project canal that pulls water out of
the Colorado River runs at the phoenix and then all
the way down across the state, down, down
to Tucson. So this is not, I don't
think this is a very hopeful part of our future
. Um everywhere I go, I get asked about
desalination those of you that aren't familiar with that term
, It's basically taking the salts out of salty water
and turning it into freshwater is represented by this cartoon
, mostly practiced pulling water out of the ocean and
so mostly used around coastal areas and mostly used by
cities. The reason being that it's extremely expensive because
it takes a log in, it takes a lot
of electricity to what they do with the desalination plant
. Pretty much as they push water through a permeable
membrane in a big factory plant. And an outcome
. So that membrane captures the salts and then the
fresh water comes through for every gallon of ocean water
that you run through a desalination desalination plant. You
get a half a gallon of fresh water and a
half a gallon of really super saline salty water called
brine. And you have to figure out how to
dispose of that brian safely as well. But anyway
, very energy intensive. And that makes this water
very, very expensive. And that makes it limited
only the places that can afford to pay this water
. It's about 10 times what it cost to pull
water out of your local aquifer, your local river
or to build a storage reservoir. And so this
is going to have very limited applications, about two
of the water supply. And the plan is being
served by desalination. I do have hope and I
do think this is an appropriate technology in the right
place under the right circumstances. Don't get me wrong
. I think there is a place for this and
the use of desalinization is increasing very, very rapidly
and it's going to be important part of the solution
in a lot of different places. But this is
not going to solve the water scarcity problems of the
world. There's also a lot of talk about reusing
water recycling water and it's a fantastic idea, particularly
in cities. If you can take the water that's
used in the city, 90 of it, 95
of it goes down your drain. Think about taking
a shower very little of that. Water ends up
not going down your drain, some of it ends
up in the steam coming out of the shower,
some of it ends up on your towel, but
most of it, 95 of it goes down the
drain similarly with your toilet, similarly with your dishwashers
, etc. So what a wonderful idea than to
take that water, clean it up again and reuse
it, recycle it. There's even places in the
world that actually drink that water afterwards, and we're
gonna see a lot more of that in the future
. The limitations on that idea. So from a
, you know, most of us think about that
as being, you know, that's that's the this
is a classic sustainable strategy, right? Sustainable water
use strategy. It's green, it's environmentally friendly.
Um the problem is that again, the process of
having to retreat the water after you after you've used
it requires a lot of energy and energy is expensive
. So again, unfortunately, reuse and recycling continues
to be a very, very expensive option for trying
to bolster your water supply. Um And another,
another area that I think is hopeful in this respect
is most of the places that reuse water that recycled
water are treating that water to drinking water quality before
they re use it well. If you're putting it
out on an agricultural field or using it on a
golf course, you certainly don't need to be treating
it to that high level of quality. And so
we could perhaps save some of the cost of the
treatment if we can lower how, how hard we're
trying to treat it. So this gets down to
the issues of of water options, right? So
in our toolbox and our water toolboxes, I refer
to it in chasing water. I talk about all
these different ways that you can balance your water budget
if you're running out of water. Most places in
the world have gone to have tried, have looked
at that challenges being how do I get more water
? How do I increase the supply side of the
equation? And as I've been saying, the pretty
much all of these options are on the top are
supply side options. You see the expense of desalination
, water, recycling, importing water. This is
only for one case, but this is these these
trends and these relative costs are the same in most
places in the world, groundwater and surface water that's
using your local water supplies. Um But I want
to draw your attention. I'm gonna spend the rest
of the talk talking about this. It's it's trying
to deal with this problem of water scarcity of water
shortages, not so much by trying to increase your
supplies. Because I'm arguing that those options are going
to become more and more limited and very, very
expensive. And there's not a lot of people going
to want to give you their water anymore, and
we really need to start focusing on the demand side
on how we can use less water um in order
to solve this problem. So again in the book
, I talk about this at considerable length and basically
, I think about this as creating water, but
this isn't creating water by turning ocean water into fresh
water instead. The idea here is that each gallon
of water that we don't consume is a gallon of
water that's available for other users or for nature.
And so I really like the idea of thinking about
water conservation or improved efficiencies as creating water because it's
the water that you don't have to use and is
being made available for other purposes. So let me
just talk about a couple of big use categories of
water. Talk about cities first, um there have
been some really, really interesting progress being made discussions
, dialogue taking place within the urban areas about sustainable
water use. And I've been part of this of
a group that's been trying to develop a model ordinance
for cities that in essence would commit the city to
not increasing their water use going forward to flat line
their water use. Now this is very, very
realistic and very possible. And I'll note for you
that within the United States overall, We have flattened
our water use since 1975. We've added 80-100 million
people in the United States. And we're not using
any more water than we did in 1975. So
this is not a pipe dream. This isn't being
, you know, being unrealistic about the potential,
there is great potential to be able to do this
. And but I think it's a really important first
step for cities to commit to this, to take
this seriously and say, look, we understand that
we can continue to grow if we use water better
, it doesn't have to limit our population growth.
It doesn't have to limit our economy, our economic
production. We can actually get by using less water
. And one of the really important ways that cities
are going to be able to do this is by
paying attention to how they use water outdoors. Um
We don't have to worry about that so much here
in Virginia. You know, I have a I
have a green grass lawn, I never thought I'd
have a green grass lawn, but I don't have
to irrigate it. It's entirely uh supported by by
rainfall. And so that's really nice. That's a
real luxury, you know in some ways for people
who live in the parts of the country, particularly
northeastern United States and the upper midwest that you can
do that. But the rest of the country,
if you want that kind of outdoor landscaping, you're
gonna have to put water on it. And it
turns out that in most of the most U.
S. Cities half of the water use 30 to
50 is going to doing this to watering things outside
to creating landscapes that need supplemental water. And so
there was some really great piece of research that was
done out at U. C. Davis University of
California Davis where they did a comparison of cities across
Australia and compared them to cities in the western United
States. And they documented the Australians are using half
the amount of water that western U. S.
Cities are using. And it's because entirely 90 of
the of the reason of the explanation is because the
way that they use water outdoors they're using landscape plants
that do perfectly well on the available water supply falling
out of the sky on rainfall. That's the big
difference. A little bit of the difference between the
cities has to do with toilets and other water efficient
appliances inside. But I want to turn now to
the opportunities out on farms. Um, for the
obvious reason I told you that 90 of the water
being consumed in water scarce series being used on farms
. So we have to look at farms and in
fact, there are very, very few places in
the world where we're gonna be able to resolve water
scarcity by not doubling tripling down on, trying to
figure out how to use less water on farms.
Now, something I want to say. So,
the thing is coming into a lot of your minds
, I'm sure, is how in the world are
we going to use less water on farms? Because
we're gonna be producing a lot less food. Our
population is growing here in the United States and around
the world. The United States is responsible for feeding
a number of other places in the world. We
export a great deal of food. Um, We
are the largest exporter of virtual water by the way
, because we use a lot of our water supply
to grow crops that are water intensive, that aren't
able to be grown, at least in the volume
that's required in a lot of other countries. So
we are the biggest exporter of water intensive crops on
the planet. So what I'm talking about here is
not reducing agricultural production, and I'm not talking about
reducing the revenue revenue generation that farmers can earn.
Um, it is very realistic to be able to
produce the same or even slightly greater volume of food
and other crops by using substantially less water. Um
, again, I harnessed the intellectual capacity of a
group of my students, student researchers over the course
of the last year, and we looked around the
world, we scoured the literature, um and we
looked with great scrutiny at places. It had credible
defensible evidence of being able to use less water on
irrigated farms, um using a wide variety of strategies
. But we held ourselves to the standard of they
couldn't have shown any reduction in the agricultural production,
so they had to save water but keep the production
the same. And we built a very, very
large database of examples from around the world and published
in the paper that will show up in the journal
Water Policy, which is available online. It should
show up any day. Um this particular paper,
but here's some of the things that we found is
just in the way that you apply the water to
the crop field can actually make a big difference in
terms of how much water you're using up. Um
And by the way, let me back up because
I'm going to use a term of art real quick
here and I want to, I want to be
clear for those of you that have some familiarity with
irrigation science, agricultural crop science and that sort of
thing. Most people, when they talk about most
people in the world and manufacturers of efficient irrigation equipment
, what they talk about is how much less water
you have to withdraw out of the water source to
put on your farm, but they're not paying attention
to the fact that a good amount of that water
, sometimes a substantial portion of that water that you
pulled out of the river and apply it on the
farm actually returned back to the water source. It
seats back into the groundwater or it ran off the
farm fields and got back into the river or back
into the lake. And so they have, they
have inflated the estimates of how much water can be
saved because they're not paying attention to this issue of
return flow, the amount of water that gets back
into the system. So they've been overemphasizing, they've
been overrating how much can be done. So we
were very careful about these things I just wanted to
mention again for those of you that understand this issue
in this problem. So when you just look at
how much water actually gets consumed gets lost and isn't
returned back into the water source By shifting the way
that you apply the water to the farm field.
You can reduce by, as it says here,
34-57%. Things like instead of flooding the farm fields
with water and having all that evaporation directly from the
water surface as well as from the soil, becoming
more careful with the way that you apply the water
. The picture on the bottom right, of course
, being drip irrigation, applying the water right to
the root zone, right to the plant roots in
a very, very careful way and we can reduce
that consumptive use of water quite substantially. The other
area that I think is really interesting, we're gonna
hear a lot of discussion about this in the coming
decades here in the United States and many other parts
of the country is deciding whether or not we're going
to continue to grow the same crops in the same
places and this is going to become a bigger and
bigger issue of course, under climate change, um
one of my colleagues has, has done some modeling
and mapping, looking at what's projected, what's forecast
from the climate change models in the next few decades
and what that's gonna mean for agricultural crop production,
which kind of crops you can grow in different places
in the United States and what you see for many
of the major crops is moving for literally from texas
up into Canada, because we can will no longer
be able to produce those crops that we've been used
to producing. So whether it's being driven by climate
change and changing water availability or just because um we're
trying to save a lot less water or because we're
trying to take advantage of of different crops um may
provide greater economic returns to the farmers. So there
is great potential to rethink what we're going to grow
. Where and again, look at the percentage of
water savings that might be available to us. If
we can do that, I'm gonna finish on one
last topic. And what I mean by this,
by sharing water is the context here, is that
in many of the water scarce regions of the world
, the governments have developed what are called water allocation
systems. What that means is that they keep track
of the inventory by telling each water user how much
water they get to use. And it's a legal
right. It's a legal right or a legal entitlements
. Sometimes they call them permits, but basically they're
controlling water use through a formal water allocation system.
Now, in the places that are doing that many
of those places, you can also you also have
the opportunity to trade that legal right, either in
part or in whole, why would a farmer want
to do that? Um Some farmers are getting old
and getting and getting out of the business and their
kids don't want to take over the farm, they're
going to go out of production. The water is
worth a great deal. They can sell it to
somebody else who wants to use their water that takes
agricultural farms out of production though. And so that's
not a very desirable thing in the Western us,
we refer to that as buy and dry. Um
, and it's caused some real problems in some agricultural
communities and really unraveled the social fabric and some of
those communities if you do too much of that.
But some farmers are wanting to get out and that's
, that's one of the motivations. The much,
much better scenario or story is you have a farmer
who realizes that he or she can produce the same
crop by using some of these water saving strategies.
Water efficiency strategies use less water than they have historically
used and no longer need the full portion of their
water rights of their entitlements and then they can take
that portion and neither sell it permanently or rent it
, lease it from year to year. And so
we've talked about growing not only growing crops but growing
water if they deploy this kind of a strategy and
I think it's going to help it is helping a
lot of farmers economically, giving them an additional revenue
stream. And it's become a very powerful catalyst for
improved water conservation of water use efficiency because if you're
motivated, if you're incentivized financially by doing this by
using less water and being rewarded from that, then
then that's a that's a powerful force. So we're
seeing more and more of that. Here is just
one story I'll finish with to illustrate how some of
this is playing out here in the United States.
I happen to grow up in SAn Diego. San
Diego grew, you know, leaps by leaps and
bounds over the last century, particularly during World war
two, San Diego became a very important naval base
. And and tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of
, of navy personnel came into San Diego and many
of them ended up staying like my father and my
parents ended up settling there because of his time in
the Navy. Um so San Diego has been growing
and expanding and needing more and more water supply.
And in the late 1990s, after they've exhausted all
the local water supply, they started getting dependent on
these water importation pipelines. They pulled it in from
the Colorado River and they pulled it in from the
central, from the state water project, from northern
California. But beginning in the late 1990s and early
2000, they shifted strategy. They realized that they
could work with the farmers in the imperial irrigation district
who use a great deal of water they use in
total, that one irrigation district Uses 20 of all
the water in the Colorado River. And so the
imperial irrigation district was an obvious partner, or somebody
that the city thought they should go talk to,
to see whether not they couldn't work out some sort
of arrangement. They worked out an arrangement where they
pay these farmers over$60 million dollars every year out
in this irrigation district. And in turn, the
farmers use those funds to change the way that they
apply water. They change the crops that they're growing
. Sometimes they might temporarily fallow their crop. They
may not grow a crop in one year so that
they can instead take some of these payments from SAN
Diego. They are lining their ditches and canals,
or they're putting in a lot of monitoring and instrumentation
, doing all kinds of things. The important thing
is the farmers decide what to do. Um the
city doesn't tell them how to save the water.
The farmers figure that out. They've raised their hand
. They volunteer, I want to save some water
, I want to sell some water to SAn Diego
. And the result of all of this is that
that transfer of water now from the Imperial irrigation district
to the city of San Diego is a third of
San Diego's water supply and it's increasing. Um so
this is the kind of story that you're going to
see playing out in the western United States and a
lot of the other water scarce areas of the world
. And it's all based on saving water. It's
on the potential to save water and the reduction in
the economic expense of trying to get more water.
And if we can figure out ways to economically incentivized
saving water, we could really see a quite a
quite a rapid change take place. So this is
the picture of San Diego's water supply I mentioned in
the early 1990s 96 of the water supply came from
bringing it in from from hundreds of miles away.
Um by 2011 they were starting to rebalance um they
were down to 44. So the pie is growing
, they're using more water over time, but 44
coming from water importation, but they're starting to invest
by that point in water conservation. Specifically, the
deal with the imperial irrigation district Was already in place
in the early 2000. So by 2011 over a
quarter. Now, if you look at both,
how much is coming out of the Imperial irrigation district
, which is in the green, combined with what
they're doing with urban water conservation inside the city,
which is in the red you're getting to almost half
of SAn Diego's water supply being based on water conservation
being driven by water conservation. That's the city of
the future. That's, that's a sustainable water future
for a city like SAn Diego. This is my
last slide. Um, and it's just a wrap
up of everything that I said, but I always
like to make sure that some of the really important
points that I've shared with you come across loud and
clear. So, um, we have, so
again, a third of the water sources on the
planet rivers, lakes and aquifers are being very,
very heavily utilized to the point of exhaustion, 90
on average, not in every single water basin,
but on average, across all of those places,
90 is going to irrigated farms, about 10 of
the water going to cities and industry. The result
being that we've dried up many, many river and
lake ecosystems and groundwater biographers around the planet where we
need to go over the next couple of decades is
very, very clear in my mind. And that
is, we need to start investing in using a
lot less water for irrigated agriculture. We need to
use a lot less because the irrigated agriculture uses so
much water. The volume that gets freed up from
any water savings is enormous. You can reduce the
water being consumed in irrigation agriculture by 10 in supply
, all of the cities and industries around the world
With 10 reduction in irrigated agriculture. That's, that's
a gross average. But it gives you some idea
of the magnitude that I'm talking about here in cities
. We need to do our part. Um,
we need to freeze the amount of water that we're
using and and start moving toward reducing and hopefully I've
provided you with some evidence of how that can be
done, particularly focusing on outdoor landscaping. And then
lastly, I hope that we can use a lot
of this water to bring some of those natural ecosystems
back into a more healthy condition. I had a
wonderful two days here at Virginia Tech and I was
really impressed. You are the best and the brightest
students, faculty researchers, You've got the talent,
you've got the intellect, you've got the skills to
do this. So let's go Hokies and get this
job done. All right, thank you. And
so is uh Stephen and Bill said, um,
we have time for questions. This is always my
favorite part of doing these things. Um, I'd
be very gratified to you if you if you come
up and hit me with whatever you got. Um
, If your voice doesn't project, we're going to
ask you to try to come up to one of
the mix, but those of you think you have
booming voices, we could give it a try.
Um So I see your hand back here first stand
up please, yep. Um So I hit on
a couple of them and the way that you apply
the water um they have made big advances in sprinkler
systems. Um you know they've gone from sprinkler systems
that used to spray such fine particles of such fine
particles or droplets I should say of water that they
lost a lot to evaporation particularly. It was windy
and hot outside um while they were doing this and
now they go to low pressure systems that make bigger
drops and they put those sprinklers much closer to the
ground. Um Low energy precision application leap systems.
So the way that you apply the water is an
important one, but another one that I didn't hit
on here, And it's a really, really important
one is the soil health, the soil quality itself
. So if you've got enough organic matter in the
soil by mulching by no till agriculture, various methods
, you can substantially increase the moisture retention capacity of
the soil. And that means that you're going to
have to apply less supplemental irrigation water. So I
think a lot of the soil health movement is starting
to take place here in the United States. Um
and in particular in the young farming community, the
folks that are, you know, the 20somethings and
30 some things that are going back to the farm
and the second back to the land movement um which
is really cool and I love it. Um so
much attention on the soil, It's all about the
soil, right? So if you get the soil
right, you can save an awful lot of water
and produce much healthier food as well. So those
are some of the some of the particular ones,
and I saw a hand up over here, please
. Okay. The question was about Hampton Roads and
I don't know this particular project, but it's come
up in the last couple days, this is the
second time. So they're trying to reuse, they're
trying to recycle their water so they're taking um they're
taking water that's being used within the city of Hampton
roads presumably and they're treating it, I presume in
some way. Um But here's where the here's where
you end up with really the psychological problems, so
we can treat wastewater to the point where it's absolutely
safe to drink, you know, after we've run
it through a treatment process um at least for most
waste waters. Um But the problem is psychological,
it's what we call the yuck factor in the water
community, people can't stand the thought that you're going
to drink something that's already been through some of these
toilet. Well it turns out that most of the
water that we drink has gone through a toilet somewhere
just maybe it was way upstream, you know,
and in some other city, you know treated and
put it back in the river and it comes down
to us and then we drink it well. So
the idea of injecting it into an aquifer after you've
treated it is trying to get at that psychological barrier
. Um It doesn't necessarily do a whole lot more
in terms of purifying the water, but it does
do some, it depends upon the aquifer in the
soil there and all. But but really it's to
try to get over that psychological barrier, so by
putting it back in the ground and then pumping it
, you know, somewhere later or at some distance
away, people get more comfortable with that. They're
also using that same psychological strategy by the way for
reservoirs. So in san Diego they couldn't stand the
idea of doing direct potable reuse of recycling the water
and putting it right back in the water distribution system
. So they put it in the water reservoirs and
somehow magic happens up the reservoir and everybody gets comfortable
with it. Um So you know that's what's going
on but you know um I don't want to Pollyannish
about this because there are a lot of things in
that are getting into our water systems that are that
are wastewater treatment technologies are not dealing with very well
. There's a lot of nasties in particularly um some
of the pesticides, you know, various hormones,
various prescription drugs, things like that. We're not
getting it all out. So that's not a problem
exclusive to this idea of reusing water. It's a
it's a problem for us. And and there's many
people in this audience, I'm sure that are much
better versed in that particular problem than I am right
in the middle here. Yeah, yeah, yeah
. This question, this discussions come up in a
couple different places over the last couple days. Um
we human beings are not genetically wired to be able
to handle slow moving problems. Uh climate change being
the best illustration of that. But you know,
but water and water shortages and the fact that you
can look at a graph and see that, you
know, the water availability is about to you know
, the water uses about the intersect with the water
availability. Hello Houston, we have a problem but
we're not good at doing anything even when we have
evidence in front of us. I do think that
that we could do a much better job of educating
and building awareness and building action around doing better planning
and better water management overall through communications and marketing strategies
. But one of the real problems is the unwillingness
of governments and utilities to admit that there's a problem
. Um for example, in water utilities in cities
, urban water providers, they don't like to admit
that people are going to need to cut back on
water that they need to implement water conservation one because
their revenue stream is dependent upon selling water to customers
. So they don't want to deal with the shortages
in their water and their water related revenues and the
water sales. There are some infrastructure challenges when you
start pushing much less water through a pipe that was
designed to flow full, for instance, of wastewater
discharge pipe that can cause some real problems and that
is a real problem. But when I was writing
the book, I interviewed a number of water utility
managers and one of the interesting things that some of
them admitted was we don't want to tell anybody that
we need to conserve water because then that stigmatizes our
community as being at risk of running out of water
. And so if you ask the city water managers
in phoenix or las Vegas or Denver or whatever,
they're always gonna tell, you, don't worry,
we're perfectly safe, we're gonna have plenty of water
. They will all tell you that even if they
understand that that story say about the Colorado River,
which is really going to create some really, really
serious problems for us in the, in the coming
decades. They just won't admit it publicly. And
so I don't quite know how you get past that
about how you really start telling the truth the full
truth and nothing but the truth about what's really coming
. Because then I think the marketers and the communication
experts can figure out how to how to convey that
somehow. But you have to have them willing to
say, you know, that's actually is what happened
, What's happening. This is this is factual over
here. What? Yeah, um, great question
. So the question is, okay, so they're
using less water and irrigated agriculture and that water is
going to the city, but that doesn't do anything
for the restoration of the Colorado River, for example
. None of that water is going back to nature
and that is true and that's a problem. Um
or it's a lost opportunity, I should say.
Um What, what I'd like to see is much
more of the, that kind of project taking place
where some portion of it ends up being returned back
to nature back to the river ecosystem or back to
the aquifer to recharge the aquifer. Um and just
making that part of nature tax, if you will
, some portion of the water needs to be returned
because we've heavily damaged and degraded, depleted these natural
ecosystem. So it should be part of the story
. It should be part of the story. Yes
. Right. Um You mean the kind of credits
or water rights are trading that sort of thing that
I was talking about, So. Okay. So
um the question was are there any, are there
any cities or communities on the atlantic seaboard that are
doing some of these sorts of things? Um There
are some, there are some examples. I gave
a talk at north Carolina state last year. So
I had to do a little bit of research on
the local situation down in north Carolina. It turns
out that in the coastal plain, biographers of eastern
north Carolina, they have had serious groundwater overdraft problems
and the aquifer levels have been declining pretty pretty precipitously
. And they have put into place a management plan
for those coastal plain og refers that sets a limit
, sets a cap On the total extraction that basically
freezing, you know, the the extraction of water
from the groundwater aquifers at the present level. And
then and then they have a projected reduction in that
use over the next 10, 20 years, so
giving everybody time to wean themselves off of the aquifer
, becoming more conservative or efficient with their water,
use their building that into the planning and, and
as part of that as I understand it, there's
also, um, a specification of how much water
to the users gets to use. So in essence
, the shares kind of a system. Um,
there's talk of this in a lot of different places
, particularly in the Southeast, down in southwest Georgia
. You know, we've been having some conversations because
they have the same problem uh, over pumping of
the Floridian aquifer, the upper Floridian aquifer that extends
up into southwest Georgia. So there are a couple
places, um, many of my colleagues and particularly
the environmental community, um, the idea of water
rights is anathema to them because they see that as
being commodification and privatization of water. And I think
there, I think they're missing the point. Um
, in my opinion, I think that if you've
got, if you're approaching a situation which we are
in the southeastern US and now across more of the
atlantic seaboard and even up into the upper midwest,
this problem is not something uh, that they're never
going to have to deal with. In fact,
you know, some places city of Charlottesville, where
I live Had a really, really serious drought in
2002, and we had to go into really severe
mandatory water conservation measures. So it's happening here in
Virginia and it's happening even farther north into Massachusetts and
other places. So water scarcity is going to be
a problem in a lot of places, um,
with the climate changing and with the growth in population
and water demands. And I don't know of any
other way to manage that problem other than to get
into managing the inventory by the issuance of permits and
rights and entitlements and that. So, so just
from a pure simple management standpoint, I think you
have to do that whether or not you want to
also enable people to do, you know what I
suggested with sharing water and trading water and creating a
water market around water, it starts to put in
real monetary value on the water. And some people
, again, they gag on that, they don't
think that you should be putting a price on water
. Um You know, I see I see the
upside, you know, to be honest with you
, I see that by by placing, by allowing
water to assume a monetary value, it could be
a very powerful driver for using water in a lot
better way. Um and you don't have to do
that by entitlements and and markets and that sort of
thing. You can do that by just water pricing
in general. And so this issue of how much
you charge for water in cities, you know,
is is another way to gain some control on that
. But but again, the ideas and the strategies
and the concepts are really, really well known.
I said, you know, some students earlier today
, we don't need like rocket science breakthroughs. You
know, most of the stuff that we need to
know to solve this problem, you know, in
the world, we already know how to do it
. But what we do have to figure out and
and not to dissuade anybody from continuing to work on
technological advancements and you know, and better energy sources
so that, you know, things like desalination become
more cost effective and more reasonable. Um but what
we really need to focus on her, what are
the financial incentives to get people to change behaviors?
Um what are the necessary policy reforms? Uh how
do you get water managers in the Colorado River basin
to come out and publicly admit that they have a
problem? Um Those are those are some of the
some of the real issues, but in particular the
economic and financial drivers, I think is something that
we really need to need to figure out. So
we know how to do it. We just need
to figure out how to convince people to do it
right here in the middle first. Yes. Very
boy. Uh huh. What, yep. So
the question was about aquifers is enough attention being paid
to the health or the the, you know,
the proper management, the sustainable management of aquifers.
And the answer is absolutely not. Um They're very
, very few places in the world, there are
fewer places in the world that have management plans for
aquifers than we have management plans for surface water.
Um it's kind of like that unknown, hidden,
mysterious water and uh we don't know how to manage
it well. Um presently about 20 of all of
our food is being grown on unsustainably pumped groundwater aquifers
and that's worsening pretty fast right now. So the
thing about aquifers is that they don't recharge as quickly
as a river does, so you dry up a
river and at least, you know, you've got
more rain coming, or more snowmelt coming or whatever
and you know, it can, it can potentially
refill and restore the river in the future with groundwater
aquifers. The recharge rates are so slow um that
we have to be particularly careful with them. And
uh but there are some hopeful signs, you may
have heard out in California. So California had one
of its very worst droughts and record up until this
year, and now they don't have more water than
they know what to do with this year. And
so everybody's forgotten about water conservation, but um they
dried up pretty much dried up the state's rivers.
They've issued five times more water rights in California than
all the water flowing down the rivers in California.
So my story about they just keep giving away the
water rights until, you know, they end up
with problems. That's the situation in California. And
so when they ran out of the water in the
rivers and they started drilling wells and they drilled a
record number of wells last year um in California because
there was no more surface water and they depleted the
groundwater levels at an unprecedented rate 10 times faster than
they had been doing in previous years. And but
that precipitated that opened up a legislative opportunities, political
opportunity that fortunately they seized upon. And they passed
a landmark bill in California called the sustainable groundwater management
act or sigma, which essentially calls for sustainable management
of all the states photographers over the long term.
So they've got to figure out for each and every
aquifer and for all the local users depending upon those
aquifers, how they can stabilize the water levels in
the groundwater aquifers. So there's some hope there and
there's some good examples in other places also where they
have done a good job of management but but we
got a long, long way to go. I'm
gonna take one more. Okay, right over here
and that's the last one, the water. Yeah
. Say again. How does Mhm. Oh yeah
. Okay, good. So the question being,
how does this water that we're saving it back to
the ecosystems? Well The easiest ways, you just
don't take it out of the ecosystem in the first
place. So if you use to use 100 units
of water and now you're only using 60 units of
water, that's 40 units of water that stay in
the water system in the ecosystem and not being used
. There are some places in the world though where
um for various reasons you may want to take some
of the water that was previously used for irrigation and
move it to a different ecosystems. So in Australia
, we're doing this where we're buying water rights from
farmers and then literally taking the water that they're not
using out of their irrigation canals and piping and pumping
it to wetland areas that haven't received water for 40
some years now, Detroit. And those wetlands are
coming back in a very spectacular way. So you
don't, but that physical manipulation of the water isn't
really necessary in most places. You just, it's
just that you're not taking it out in the first
place. Makes sense. Okay, that's all of
our time and thank you so much for the great
questions your attention today. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah 1464 01:17:11.630 --> A:middle L:90% . Yeah.