Peak Water: Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry. How Three Re...

Water has been a serious issue in the developing world for so long that dire reports of shortages in Cairo or Karachi barely register. But the scarcity of freshwater is no longer a problem restricted to poor countries. Shortages are reaching crisis proportions in even the most highly developed regions, and they're quickly becoming commonplace in our own backyard, from the bleached-white bathtub ring around the Southwest's half-empty Lake Mead to the parched state of Georgia, where the governor prays for rain. Crops are collapsing, groundwater is disappearing, rivers are failing to reach the sea. Call it peak water, the point at which the renewable supply is forever outstripped by unquenchable demand.

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This is not to say the world is running out of water. The same amount exists on Earth today as millions of years ago — roughly 360 quintillion gallons. It evaporates, coalesces in clouds, falls as rain, seeps into the earth, and emerges in springs to feed rivers and lakes, an endless hydrologic cycle ordained by immutable laws of chemistry. But 97 percent of it is in the oceans, where it's useless unless the salt can be removed — a process that consumes enormous quantities of energy. Water fit for drinking, irrigation, husbandry, and other human uses can't always be found where people need it, and it's heavy and expensive to transport. Like oil, water is not equitably distributed or respectful of political boundaries; about 50 percent of the world's freshwater lies in a half-dozen lucky countries.

Freshwater is the ultimate renewable resource, but humanity is extracting and polluting it faster than it can be replenished. Rampant economic growth — more homes, more businesses, more water-intensive products and processes, a rising standard of living — has simply outstripped the ready supply, especially in historically dry regions. Compounding the problem, the hydrologic cycle is growing less predictable as climate change alters established temperature patterns around the globe.

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One barrier to better management of water resources is simply lack of data — where the water is, where it's going, how much is being used and for what purposes, how much might be saved by doing things differently. In this way, the water problem is largely an information problem. The information we can assemble has a huge bearing on how we cope with a world at peak water.

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One barrier to better management of water resources is simply lack of data — where the water is, where it's going, how much is being used and for what purposes, how much might be saved by doing things differently. In this way, the water problem is largely an information problem. The information we can assemble has a huge bearing on how we cope with a world at peak water.

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London's infrastructure has a more fundamental problem: It's creaking with age. "Charles Dickens was the best-selling author when most of our pipe work went in," says John Halsall, director of water services at Thames Water, the private company that provides water to greater London. Thames Water maintains more than 300 reservoirs, 99 treatment plants, and more than 20,000 miles of pipe. The city's water system was a triumph of 19th-century engineering, but one-third of the mains are more than 150 years old, veterans of such scourges as Hitler's bombs and corrosively acidic soil. Thames' system leaks 180 million gallons a day, 30 percent of overall flow. To fix a leak, which the company does some 82,000 times a year, it has to shut down traffic and dig up the streets in one of the most congested cities on Earth. A brief walk around the West End turns up a half-dozen work crews digging up Victorian mains, scooping through layers of history to repair the pipes one segment at a time.

Replacing all the Victorian pipes would cost an estimated $3.6 billion. The conundrum facing Thames Water is how to upgrade the crumbling system without tearing up the city or bankrupting the company. There are two sets of solutions: On one hand are small, local, high tech projects. On the other are traditional large-scale civil engineering initiatives that have been a staple of water management since the Roman Empire. Tompkins favors the small-scale approach. In particular, he likes metering. There's no way to measure the water flowing through much of the underground infrastructure, which makes it hard to identify leaky sections. Likewise, not even a quarter of the city's households are metered, and that makes it difficult to encourage conservation. If consumers understood exactly how much they were using, Tompkins reasons, perhaps they would change their behavior, like a dieter motivated by the scale readout every morning.

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Michael Tapia shows me a device called iStaq. Tapia is CEO of Qonnectis, iStaq's manufacturer. Barely the size of a hardcover book, the unit can be tucked away under a manhole cover and transmit measurements of water level, pressure, flow, and other variables. "The system itself is intelligent," Tapia says. "It will send you an email or text saying, You have a burst pipe.'" Qonnectis has a $400,000 contract with Thames Water to help detect leaks.

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Research shows that installing a meter in a house so people can see how much water they're using can reduce consumption by 10 percent.

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Thames Water's most controversial project is a $400 million desalination plant called the Thames Gateway. The proposed facility could take in seawater, filter out the salt, and deliver 35 million gallons of drinking water a day during drought emergencies. Desalination would essentially drought-proof the city, the company claims. It's an appealing solution. The ocean is practically limitless, and the plant would run on biodiesel, giving it a green imprimatur. The project was moving through the approval process in 2006 when London's tough, left-leaning mayor, Ken Livingstone, blocked it.

Livingstone argued that the plant was too expensive and that desalination is too energy-intensive. Stripping seawater of its salt is a pricey way to obtain freshwater, cost-effective only for high-end uses like drinking, but not bathing or watering gardens. And the mayor questioned the proposal's environmental cred: Biodiesel emits carbon, and desalination's super-salty byproduct is toxic to marine life. Thames Water would do better, he insisted, to repair London's decrepit labyrinth of pipes.

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In Peter Gleick's view, we have to move away from the "hard path," the massive civil-engineering projects and exploitation of untapped sources that defined the 20th century. Instead, we must turn to a "soft path," making the most efficient use of what we already have. Technology can help, and some new infrastructure will be necessary, Gleick believes. But the larger issue is conceptual: We must view efficiency itself as a source of water and tap this hidden wellspring. Americans already use 20 percent less water per capita than they did a generation ago. Gains in industrial use are even more impressive: A ton of US steel manufactured today requires just 2 percent of the water it did in the 1940s. Still, we are using more than we have. Can we change enough, and soon enough? "The whole point of peak water," Gleick says, "is that we have to fundamentally rethink who gets to use water for what."

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