Why is Water such an important asset #COP27 from #transhumancode
#COP27 has commenced in Sharm El-Sheikh #Climate Implementation Summit (SCIS) and gere are some thoughts on water scarcity extracted from #transhumancode bestseller
May is the hottest month in Ethiopia. Toward the northernmost region, an abandoned settlement called Dallol holds the record for hottest place on earth: a scorching 180 degrees above ground and boiling below with acidic springs that bloom yellow salty reefs across its Martian landscape. About 150 miles southwest, sits a dusty village called Meda. While the climate is more forgiving, there is no power or running water, no post office, no general store to buy a Coke or bottle of water. A dozen eggs, purchased from a neighbor, cost six cents.
13-year-old Letikiros Hailu was born here. She lived in a simple dwelling made of rocks and caked mud with her mother and sister and her husband, a handsome priest’s servant named Abebe. Although arranged marriages were the custom, Letikiros’s mother chose thoughtfully for her daughter. Abebe was poor, but he was kind and gentle, and falling in love was easy for Letikiros.
Life in rural Ethiopia was not easy. Especially for the women of Meda. The closest water source, Arliew Spring, was a two-hour walk down a cliff-side footpath strewn with loose, slippery rocks. Girls had fallen 700 feet to their deaths making the journey.
Four days a week, Letikiros would strap a 10-lb. clay pot to her back with a frayed rope and begin her walk for water. Once she reached the bottom of the ravine, she’d fall in line behind others and wait to collect the dirty water that trickled through large boulders covered in baboon excrement. Arliew Spring spilled out enough water to fill about three pots every hour. Letikiros would be home by dark with five gallons, the equivalent of three toilet flushes or a two-minute shower.
Sometimes the line was too long and she’d head for the Bembya River, an even more treacherous trek, but one that was rewarded with stunning views of the Simien Mountains. Bearded vultures soared over mountain peaks, holding bones in their mouths like dogs, and flinging them against the rocks until they shattered into tiny digestible pieces.
Most girls in the village quit school once they married. But not Letikiros. “Things will be changed for us if we work hard and fight to improve our lives,” she would say. Her mother agreed. So when Letikiros wasn’t fetching water, she studied with determination. At 13, she’d completed the equivalent of third grade.
On the morning of May 19, 2000, Letikiros set out before dawn for the spring, skipping breakfast in the hopes of arriving early in line. Her friend Yeshareg joined her on the path and by late afternoon, they had filled their pots and headed home together.
The girls parted ways around 3 p.m. It was the last time Yeshareg saw her friend alive.
Somewhere along the narrow trail, Letikiros faltered. Maybe her legs failed her. Or maybe hunger, coupled with the 40-lb. jug on her back, put her off-balance. When she went down, the pot smashed against the rocks, shattering into tiny pieces. The precious water she’d spent 10 hours collecting was gone in an instant, sucked up by the parched ground.
Those who knew her well say Letikiros must have been overcome with shame, knowing that her mother and sister were waiting for the water to cook dinner. Even worse the clay pot – an invaluable family asset – was destroyed. Rather than return home empty-handed, the 13-year-old took the rope, slipped it over the withered branches of a nearby tree, and hanged herself.
663 million people worldwide, like Letikiros, don’t have the clean water they need to survive. Many drink from contaminated puddles and streams – the very sources that make waterborne disease the world’s leading killer – and the cause of death for 4,000 children every single day.
On a human level, I’ve seen that it’s the women and children who suffer most. African women spend 40 billion hours a year walking for water. 20% of primary-school age girls are absent from school, often because there are no sanitation facilities for girls approaching adolescence or because the responsibility for collecting water often falls to the young girls in a household, making it almost impossible for them to attend school during regular school hours. Yet so often clean water is already there: in their own villages, flowing like liquid gold in untapped rivers, just below their feet.
The Quest for Clean Water
So, with tens of millions of girls like Letikiros walking billions of hours every year to fetch water for their families, what are the barriers keeping them from easier access to clean water? And what advances in the technology sector can help deliver clean water to the world’s nearly 700 million people who don’t have it? It turns out there are three main challenges that must be overcome in the quest to provide clean water to everyone on the planet: locating and providing water; treating and cleaning water; and reusing water.
Where finding and retrieving water is the bottleneck in the water supply chain, findings by Stanford researchers around the use of satellite technology could eliminate the costly guessing game of drilling wells. Until recently, the only way to assess the state of water tables was by installing monitoring wells and combining that information with existing well water levels. But an in-depth study of water levels in the American West found that the data was not 100% reliable, either because available data is outdated and of varying quality or because not all well data is shared by the owners.
So, this group of Stanford researchers turned to satellites emitting electromagnetic waves and gathered measurements normally used to closely track tiny changes in surface elevation. This technology, Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), previously only used to chart data on earthquakes, landslides, and volcanoes, could be evaluated for clues about groundwater. Using InSAR, they compiled water measurements of underground aquifers that matched the data from existing monitoring wells.
As satellite data improves, InSAR could eventually play a vital role in tracking seasonal changes in groundwater levels. Another research team, using similar methods, successfully mapped the groundwater levels of more than 500 rivers, lakes, and flood zones in the Amazon basin. Discovering and tracking groundwater via satellite could be a major breakthrough in the discovery, and consistent provision of, water in arid environments, perhaps even bringing the affordable and accurate drilling of wells to places like Letikiros’ village in Ethiopia.
But water isn’t just flowing in rivers under our feet – in some environments, during particular times of the year, evaporated water is literally floating in the air all around us. And some new technologies are dedicated to identifying that water, capturing it, and delivering it to communities where water has, up until now, remained a scarce resource.
One such device is called the WaterSeer, a device that at first glance looks like a well but uses the surrounding environment to pull water from the atmosphere and store it. The WaterSeer has a storage chamber six feet below ground, surrounded by cool earth. Above ground, a small turbine is rotated by the wind, spinning fan blades located on the inside of the WaterSeer. This warm, surface-level air is guided into a condensation chamber where it cools, causing vapor to condense on the sides of the chamber and flow down into the lower storage chamber. In some conditions, the WaterSeer can gather nearly ten gallons of water every day from the air.
In other areas of the world, huge net formations catch the moisture from fog. The water drips into collection trays: clean, free, and instantly available. This method was first developed in South America, but the largest such project is on the slopes of Mount Boutmezguida in Morocco and collects 6,300 liters of water each and every day.
Where these technologies have been successful, other problems inevitably arise: who will control the water supply? Who will maintain it? And in locations where water was at one time scarce, how can farmers learn to irrigate their crops in responsible ways and at proper levels? The answer to that last question, in some hot and dry climates where farmers use solar-powered pumps, is incentivizing farmers to sell excess power back to the grid, increasing their income, adding to the government’s energy reserves, and conserving water by curbing use. The International Water Management Institute estimates that introducing solar power to India’s 20 million irrigation wells could bring down carbon emissions by 4–5% per year.
Introducing technology to find and distribute water is not the only way to bring potable water to the nearly 700 million people who do not have it. In some instances, dirty or contaminated water, if treated properly, can transform communities and eradicate disease. According to the World Health Organization, 1.6 million people die every year from diarrheal diseases contracted from a lack of clean drinking water and basic sanitation – treating existing water supplies is at the forefront of many water provision strategies. Historically though, the cost of treating contaminated water, or desalinizing ocean water, has been prohibitive.
But advances in technology are mitigating these costs. For example, one of the unforeseen side effects of the highly controversial hydraulic fracturing industry has been the demand it has created for mobile water treatment facilities. Large investments are being made by massive corporations into the creation of portable reverse osmosis units that will allow companies to treat high volumes of water, extracting gas and debris. As companies pay for technology that treats water in increasing volumes, it will be possible to move away from the current system of massive, centralized, expensive treatment centers.
Researchers in India devised another solution to cleaning contaminated water: nanotechnology. Microbes are removed from the water using composite nanoparticles that emit silver ions, destroying contaminants, and the cost is only $2.50 per family per year. These advances are showing that low-cost water purification is on the horizon and could finally be commercially viable.
We can find potable water. We can see the beginning of a future where treating unclean water is affordable and portable. But how can we better recycle the water we’ve already used? The WaterHub at Emory University reduced its water footprint by nearly 40%, using an adaptive ecological technology that breaks down organic matter in wastewater, reusing it in its steam and chiller plants. This method has allowed them to reuse up to 146 million gallons of campus wastewater annually.
Technology Introduces New Challenges
These three main challenges in supplying the world with clean water are being overcome, and technology is paving the way to new answers. Potable water is being found more quickly and efficiently. The treatment of contaminated water is becoming more affordable. And new approaches are allowing for the reuse of wastewater. But the introduction of technology into procuring, treating, and reusing water hasn’t only brought answers – it has also raised new and increasingly important questions.
For example, in 2006 hackers gained access to computer systems at a water treatment plant in Harrisburg, PA, using an employee’s laptop, compromised by way of the Internet, to install a virus and spyware in the plant’s computer system. The attackers operated from outside of the US, and were not specifically targeting the water plant (they were simply using the laptop to distribute emails and other electronic information), but had they been interested in controlling or manipulating the plant’s systems, they may have been able to cause serious damage, perhaps raising the chlorine level and making the water dangerous to drink. And as recently as March of 2018, the US blamed the Russian government for an ongoing campaign of cyberattacks aimed at US infrastructure, including water management sectors.
Developing nations, barely able to afford these new water technologies, simply do not have the funding to properly secure their new smart technologies, providing soft targets for hackers.
“Michael Deane, Executive Director of the National Association of Water Companies in the U.S. explains how the evolution of computer-based management systems has, on the one hand, improved the reliability and quality of water services, but on the other has increased the possibility of targeted or accidental cyber events that could lead to disruption in the water supply. He concludes: ‘In the drinking water and wastewater sectors, a cyber attack could hone in on four different threat vectors: chemical contamination, biological contamination, physical disruption and interference with the highly-specialized computer systems controlling essential infrastructure known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.’”
New technology always insists that we consider new and more pressing questions. The utilization of a new technology may at first seem overwhelmingly positive, and in this case, where new ways of delivering drinking water to underserved communities is concerned, the technology is vital. But utilizing these new technologies is often only the toppling of the first domino – we must be prepared to follow the trail all the way to the end, examining and searching for answers to all the new questions that arise.