Rachel Nuwer via Take Part

In 1922 the conservationist Aldo Leopold canoed through a lush, verdant delta full of green lagoons, darting fish and squawking waterfowl. But Leopold’s “milk and honey wilderness,” where the Colorado River empties into Mexico’s Gulf of California, ceased to exist decades ago. In its stead, a cracked, barren mudflat stretches for miles.

“If we choose, we can have healthy rivers alongside healthy economies,” Postel said. “We don’t have to be running our rivers dry.”

“This amazing place does not exist anymore,” said Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project and freshwater fellow of the National Geographic Society. “A lot was lost.”

Ten major dams — from the Hoover Dam, erected in 1936, to the Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1966 — block the flow of the Colorado River. Countless towns and industries siphon water from the river and its many tributaries as it meanders to the sea. Today the Colorado River joins the likes of the Indus, the Rio Grande, the Nile and other major world rivers that are so over-tapped they no longer reach the sea for long stretches of time. “This is one of America’s iconic rivers,” Postel said. “I don’t think this country would be the one we know today without the Colorado.”

It does not have to be this way, however. A restoration and outreach effort called Change the Course seeks to return the river to the sea. To pursue this goal, the National Geographic Society, the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and Participant Media teamed up and pooled their expertise — science, social media, storytelling and policy — to change the fate of the once-mighty Colorado River.

A key to the campaign’s potential success rests on reversing more than 100 years of water use along the river. Since the mid-1800s, the Colorado River’s water was legally divided amongst farmers, landowners and ranchers along its course. Then, in the 1920s, seven states in the Colorado basin were allowed to divert additional water for cities, agriculture and industry. The result: more people have rights to divert water than the river has water to supply.

The clincher, however, is this: water rights holders have to “use it or lose it.” If a stakeholder does not divert his allocated amount of water from the river each year, he may lose those rights.

Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a nonprofit based in Portland, seized upon this idea.

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Lake Mead and Hoover Dam water intake towers, with previous water level, July 2009. (Photo credit: Cmpxchg8b)

As climate change makes the regions of the West, Southwest, and Great Plains warmer and drier, water demand will continue to increase, and the combined effect will place an ever greater burden on the country’s fresh water supplies — possibly completely draining important reservoirs in those areas, under some scenarios. That’s according to a new study authored by researchers with Colorado State University, Princeton and the U.S. Forest Service, and flagged yesterday by Summit County Citizens Voice.

This is consistent with other studies on the risk of future water shortages: The Department of the Interior is anticipating that by 2060 the gap between river supply and water demand in the states of the Colorado River Basin will be 3.2 million acre feet due to climate change. Research published in Environmental Science and Technology found that by 2050 one third of U.S. counties could face “high” or “extreme” risk of water shortage. And the International Energy Agency determined that if current policies remain in place, fresh water use by the energy industry alone could more than double — from 66 to 135 billion cubic meters annually by 2035.

Climate change, substantially driven by global warming and humanity’s carbon emissions, is anticipated to lead to more weather extremes in various areas — longer periods of low precipitation and water shortage in many areas, interspersed with greater deluges. And, of course, higher average temperatures to bake the same regions as they dry out. The Forest Service study used a number of different scenarios in its models, assuming different levels of future population growth, economic growth, and temperature increases:

[F]uture climate change will increase water use for agricultural irrigation and landscape maintenance in response to rising plant water requirements, and at thermoelectric plants to accommodate rising electricity demands for space cooling. Including these effects, per-capita withdrawals are projected to drop only moderately for the next few decades and then level off as the effects of climate change become greater, and total withdrawals are projected to rise nearly continuously into the future. Projected withdrawals differ across the global emissions scenarios examined, especially in the latter decades of the century.

Although precipitation is projected to increase in much of the United States with future climate change, in most locations that additional precipitation will merely accommodate rising evapotranspiration demand in response to temperature increases. Where the effect of rising evapotranspiration exceeds the effect of increasing precipitation, and where precipitation actually declines, as is likely in parts of the Southwest, water yields are projected to decline. For the United States as a whole, the declines are substantial, exceeding 30% of current levels by 2080 for some scenarios examined.

Here’s just one example of several permutations the study did, laying out the changes in future water yields in 2020, 2040, 2060 and 2080. The A1B scenarios were relatively middle-of-the-road, assuming medium population growth, high economic growth, and medium temperature increases in the future:

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Evaporation from a nuclear plant's cooling towers.

The International Energy Agency concluded that freshwater use is becoming an increasingly crucial issue for energy production around the world in its 2012 World Energy Outlook.

Between steam systems for coal plants, cooling for nuclear plants, fracking for natural gas wells, irrigation for biofuel crops, and myriad other uses, energy production consumed 66 billion cubic meters (BCM) of the world’s fresh water in 2010. That is water removed from its source and lost to evaporation, consumption, or transported out of the water basin — as opposed to water withdrawn, used, and then returned to its source for further availability, which is a far larger amount.

According to figures it shared with National Geographic, IEA anticipates this water consumption will double from 66 BCM now to 135 BCM by 2035 with most of the growth accounted for by coal and biofuels:

If today’s policies remain in place, the IEA calculates that water consumed for energy production would increase from 66 billion cubic meters (bcm) today to 135 bcm annually by 2035.

That’s an amount equal to the residential water use of every person in the United States over three years, or 90 days’ discharge of the Mississippi River. It would be four times the volume of the largest U.S. reservoir, Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead.

More than half of that drain would be from coal-fired power plants and 30 percent attributable to biofuel production, in IEA’s view. The agency estimates oil and natural gas production together would account for 10 percent of global energy-related water demand in 2035….

The surest way to reduce the water required for electricity generation, IEA’s figures indicate, would be to move to alternative fuels. Renewable energy provides the greatest opportunity: Wind and solar photovoltaic power have such minimal water needs they account for less than one percent of water consumption for energy now and in the future, by IEA’s calculations.

This presents a challenge, since river flows, aquifers, and other sources of fresh water are already being strained by the twin drains of population growth and less reliable rainfall due to climate change. The United Nations is projecting that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in regions with severe water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water-stressed conditions. Given water’s importance in different forms of energy production, this presents a double hit: Less available fresh water for human consumption, plus strained and costlier energy supplies.

IEA sees water consumption for coal electricity shooting up 84 percent, from 38 to 70 BCM per year by 2035. So-called “dry cooling” systems could address this, but the plants cost more and generate electricity less efficiently. Nor is carbon capture and sequestration technology likely to help.

While biofuels’ water consumption will be lower than coal’s — 41 BCM in 2035, up from 12 BCM today — its increase of 242 percent will be much larger. Irrigation requires a lot of water, though estimates vary wildly and the industry claims it’s finding ways to cut back. IEA puts it between four and 560 gallons of water needed to produce one gallon of corn ethanol. Other estimates put it as high as 10,000 gallons of water per one gallon of biofuel. And that’s all bound up with the damaging effect biofuel production is having on world food supplies.

There are solutions, such as moving to less water-intensive methods like pump irrigation, but the trade-off is far more electricity use from potentially unsustainable sources. Cellulosic ethanol, made from non-food sources, is another possibility, but IEA estimates it won’t be commercially viable until at least 2025.

Also, as National Geographic notes, biofuels’ level of water consumption is grossly out of whack with their contributions to world energy supplies: They provide a mere 3 percent of the energy that drives cars, trucks, ships, and aircraft, and IEA projects they’ll increase to just 5 percent by 2035 under current government policies.

As for fracking, IEA’s estimates covered the entire source-to-carrier production process, and under this framework natural gas’ water consumption reach just 2.85 BCM by 2035, or 2 percent of total consumption. Though the concentration of water use at individual fracking projects can still put a strain on water supplies for local commentaries.

1) Concentrated Solar Power 2) Saltwater greenhouses 3) Outside vegetation and evaporative hedges 4) Photovoltaic Solar Power 5) Salt production 6) Halophytes 7) Algae production

The first pilot plant in a program of installations that can sustainably produce crops, electricity, biofuels, and even plants for re-vegetation efforts in a desert environment is now up and running in the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar.

The Sahara Forest Project, which brings outfits from both Qatar and Norway together, uses desert air, sunlight, and saltwater as inputs for a system that aims to be environmentally sustainable, beneficial for local human development, and financially viable over the long term. As the project’s CEO, Joakim Hauge, puts it: “The Sahara Forest Project is all about taking what we have enough of, like saltwater, CO2, sunlight, and deserts, to produce what we need more of: sustainably produced food, water, and energy.” The hope is that the pilot project can be scaled up to installations in drier and desert climates around the world.

Essentially, the plant takes multiple sustainable technologies and integrates their inputs and outputs into a single multistage system, thus minimizing both waste and ecological footprint:

• Standard solar power and concentrated solar power: Arrays of mirrors create concentrated solar power by aiming sunlight to superheat seawater into steam. That steam can then drive turbines to create electricity, and the heated seawater is then used throughout the greenhouse system. Additional sustainable electricity is generated from arrays of standard solar photovoltaic panels.
• Saltwater for fresh water and cool air for greenhouses: Hot desert air is pulled through a flow of seawater as it enters the greenhouses. This both cools and humidifies the air, creating optimal growing conditions for the agricultural crops within. At the far end of the greenhouse, the air is heated by flows of sun-heated seawater and then encounters pipes of cooled seawater, which causes the humidity to condense into fresh water that is then used for crop irrigation.
• Outdoor vegetation: Outside the greenhouses, the seawater passes through further evaporators to create humidity for vegetation sheltered outdoors. These include trees for desert reforestation, local vegetation, various forms of crops and livestock feed, and specific forms of plants naturally adapted to salt water which serve as feedstocks for bioenergy production and other uses. At the end, remaining seawater is collected into evaporation pools for the production of salt.
• Algae biofuel production: Lab-grown algae, which have been shown to generate up to 30 times more biofuel per acre than other plants, are grown in saltwater pools to create biofuels without taking up agricultural land or crops that double as food for humans.

The basic advantage of the Sahara Forest Project is that it doesn’t use any fundamentally new or experimental technology — it merely recombines established technologies in creative ways.

At the same time, at least one of its goals — growing plants for reforestation — may be overly ambitious. “Trying to grow trees in the Sahara desert is not the most appropriate approach,” Patrick Gonzalez, a forest ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told National Geographic back in 2010. “I can imagine that this scheme and type of technology in limited cases might work in certain areas like Dubai, where they’re used to making palm-shaped islands and 160-story-tall buildings.”

But for the more modest goal of returning a desert to its natural former ecosystem, “it would be more effective, but less flashy, to work with local people on community-based natural-resource management.”

One of the more dramatic effects of global warming is shrinking glaciers around the globe. 10 to 20 percent of glacier ice in the European Alps, for example, has been lost in less than two decades, and half the volume of the mountain range’s glacier ice has melted away since 1850.

Thinning and melting rates in Alaskan glaciers more than doubled over the last decade, African glaciers have declined by 60 to 70 percent since the 1900s, and most Pacific glaciers are also receding. Summer ice coverage in the Arctic could disappear entirely within a decade, and Glacier National Park may not have any glaciers by 2030.

This isn’t just destructive to wildlife and ecosystems. Given their locations, glaciers can serve as crucial supplies of fresh water for various human populations — and as they shrink year after year, those supplies tighten.

The latest example comes from a new report by The Cryosphere, which documents the shrinkage of glaciers in the Andes mountain range of South America. The glaciers have shrunk by at least a third, and possibly as much as half, since the 1970s alone. And the worst loss has been seen in the smaller, lower altitude glaciers which supply fresh water for many of the continent’s residents, according to a round-up of the report by Reuters:

Climate change has shrunk Andean glaciers between 30 and 50% since the 1970s and could melt many of them away altogether in coming years, according to a study published on Tuesday in the journal Cryosphere.

Andean glaciers, a vital source of fresh water for tens of millions of South Americans, are retreating at their fastest rates in more than 300 years, according to the most comprehensive review of Andean ice loss so far.

The study included data on about half of all Andean glaciers in South America, and blamed the ice loss on an average temperature rise of 0.7 degree Celsius over the past 70 years. [...]

The researchers also warned that future warming could totally wipe out the smaller glaciers found at lower altitudes that store and release fresh water for downstream communities.

The plot above tracks the changes in surface area for the various glaciers in the Andes since the Little Ice Age in the mid-17th to early-18th centuries. The measurements prior to 1940 were put together from studies of debris associated with the glaciers, and reconstructed from aerial photographs after that point. The drop-off in the second half of the 20th Century is precipitous.

The Zongo Glacier (the red squares) managed to avoid the dramatic shrinkage of the other glaciers because it sits at a higher altitude. The lower altitude glaciers are more vulnerable to temperature shifts, and thus have seen the worst of the melting. They’re also the glaciers that supply fresh water for both the agriculture and consumption of large populations in the arid regions of Peru and Bolivia, serving as a buffer for those communities during the dry season from May/June to August/September.

As the glaciers recede, that buffer shrinks, leaving those water supplies ever more strained. Meanwhile, the tendency of global warming to drive more extreme weather patterns could exacerbate the severity of the dry season, dealing a double blow to the people of Peru and Bolivia.

By Matt Kasper, Center for American Progress

Great Lakes Michigan and Huron set a new record low water level for the month of December, and in the coming weeks they could experience their lowest water levels ever. It’s becoming certain that, like the rest of the country, the Great Lakes are feeling the effects of climate change.

Last year was officially the warmest year on record for the lower-48 states. The hot summer air has been causing the surface water of the Great Lakes to increase in temperature. One might think this causes more precipitation around the lakes, but the warmer winter air is causing a shorter duration of ice cover. In fact, the amount of ice covering the lakes has declined about 71 percent over the past 40 years. Last year, only 5 percent of the lakes froze over –- compared to 1979 when ice coverage was as much as 94 percent.

Furthermore, the continuing effect of the historic drought in the Midwest is causing increased levels of evaporation. This combination of climate change side-effects results in low water levels for the Great Lakes.

The impact climate change has on the five lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario) will have serious implications for aquatic life, as well as high economic costs for communities.

• The Great Lakes stretch from Minnesota to New York. They account for over 80 percent of North America’s surface freshwater, and provide drinking water to 40 million U.S. and Canadian citizens.
• Many industries in the region that depend on trade through the lakes will face navigation challenges, and will have to reduce the amount of cargo carried.
• Tourism and recreational activities that are vital to coastal communities will surely feel the negative economic effects. Activity associated with recreational fishing alone is estimated to be at least $7 billion annually.
• Infrastructure investments will need to occur, as the necessity for extending docks and dredging increases.
• And the habitats of fish, birds, and other mammals will be altered.

The two maps below developed by the Great Lakes Environmental Assessment and Mapping project (GLEAM) illustrate the severity of the environmental impacts on the lakes, as well as the warming temperature of the lakes.

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If the latest news reports are any indication, the droughts that have wracked a large portion of the contiguous United States continued piling on the damage in Texas and Oklahoma through 2012. The effects will reverberate for years — and global warming will make such brutal droughts (or worse) the region’s normal climate if we keep listening to the deniers’ call to inaction.

It’s a particular bitter irony, given that the political and media cultures of both states, with Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) leading the charge, have been contributing enthusiastically to climate change denialism.

The National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration recently determined that 2012 was the hottest year on record for the lower 48 states, and research by NOAA and other institutions has linked extreme events like Texas and Oklahoma’s drought to climate change. As of December 2012, more than 42% percent of the lower 48 states were experiencing “severe” drought conditions, and 63% of the United States’ new winter wheat crop is in the drought-hit areas.

In Texas in particular, the situation is sufficiently dire that the Republicans in charge of the state are being forced to finally take concrete steps to build new reservoirs and repair the state’s water infrastructure:

In 2011, the last time the Legislature convened for one of its biennial sessions, Representative Allan Ritter, a Republican and the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, was unsuccessful in getting lawmakers to approve legislation imposing an annual fee on water users like homeowners and businesses to help finance projects in the state water plan.

But on Thursday, Mr. Ritter proposed bills that would draw $2 billion from the state’s emergency Rainy Day Fund to establish a water infrastructure bank that would lend money for the projects. This time, his proposals received support from Republican leaders and groups that are often on the opposite sides of issues, including the Sierra Club’s Texas chapter, the Texas Association of Business and other industry groups. At least 20 percent of the money available in the fund would be used for conservation and reuse efforts.

“There were people who were trying to talk about water last time, and there wasn’t any money, and there wasn’t the critical mass,” said James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, Austin. “Elite opinion begins to coalesce after a little while, and it takes people a while to get the issue out there, and I think that’s part of what’s happened with water.”

The Texas drought began in 2010 and is now the third-worst the state has seen since 1895, when record-keeping first began. The Texas Water Development Board estimates that without additional water supplies the state will be short 8.3 million acre-feet of water by 2060 (3.07 acre-feet is equivalent to one million gallons) and the shortfall could cost the state $116 billion that year. Even more tragically, since Texas is a conservative state and stingy with its budgets, the need to address straining water supplies is crowding out other critical investments such as eduction and social services.

The situation is much the same in Oklahoma, according to EnidNews.com. Gary McManus, a climatologist for the Oklahoma Climatological survey, expects the drought to topple state records again going all the way back to 1895:

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by Katie Valentine

Climate change and population growth will have serious effects on the water supply in the Colorado River Basin over the next 50 years, according to a newly-released federal study.

The study, which was funded by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation and the seven Colorado River Basin states, says that by 2060, the gap between river supply and water demand in the region will be 3.2 million acre feet. That’s more than five times the amount of water consumed annually by Los Angeles alone, and means that water management policies will need to be rethought in the Colorado River Basin states. Secretary of State Ken Salazar said the study should serve as a “call to action” to state and federal governments to create a plan for the future of the Colorado River.

“As a result of the projected population growth in the Southwestern states, and all of the states on the Colorado River Basis, and the reality of a changing climate, we’re going to be putting ever increasing demands on the Colorado River Basin,” Salazar said at a Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas.

The study considered different scenarios of population growth and climate effects to come up with its projection. Under a warming climate scenario, it predicts a flow reduction in the Colorado River of about 9 percent, along with other climactic effects:

“Droughts lasting 5 or more years are projected to occur 50 percent of the time over the next 50 years. Projected changes in climate and hydrologic processes include continued warming across the Basin, a trend towards drying (although precipitation  patterns continue to be spatially and temporally complex) increased evapotranspiration and decreased snowpack as a higher percentage of precipitation falls as rain rather than snow and warmer temperatures cause earlier melt.”

Already, the Colorado River Basin area has had to grapple with the effects of drought and increased temperatures. This spring, Colorado saw its worst drought since 2002, which contributed to devastating wildfires in the state. The state’s soil moisture over the summer was as low as 5 to 10 percent, which is well below the average moisture level of 40 percent. Last year’s warm winter caused record low snowpack levels in the region, which contributed to decreased river flow this year. And drought conditions don’t appear to be easing any time soon: NOAA’s seasonal outlook map for mid-November to late February predicted continued drought for the Colorado River Basin.

There are several options outlined in the study that would allow the River Basin area to cope with the projected water shortage, including water importation, desalinization of brackish or ocean water, expanding the reuse of municipal wastewater and changes to watershed management. One option – agricultural water conservation – is especially important, given that the 5.5 million acres of farmland supplied by the Colorado River is responsible for the majority of the river’s water demand. But municipal use is the fastest-growing sector, and so options for household and business water use reductions will have to be considered if water demand in the Colorado River Basin is to decrease.

Recently, Las Vegas, a city known for its over-the-top water displays, has put strict water restrictions in place to reduce residents’ household consumption. The city pays homeowners $1.50 per square foot to pull the grass out of their yard so that they won’t need to water it and fines residents if they don’t adhere to outdoor water use laws. Because of these efforts, Las Vegas has seen a decrease in household water use of about 30 percent over the past decade.  As climate change impacts water supplies everywhere, more initiatives like this will have to be put in place, not only in desert cities like Las Vegas or places in the Colorado River Basin, but across the U.S.

Katie Valentine graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Journalism. She is an intern with the international climate team at the Center for American Progress.

by Brett Walton, via Circle of Blue

Next week, voters in San Francisco will decide whether the city should draw up plans to end a century-old dispute over the environmental cost of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which supplies 61 percent of the city’s drinking water. The cost of removing O’Shaughnessy Dam and replacing both its storage capacity and the energy it generates would cost between $US 3 billion and $US 10 billion, according to estimates by the state of California.

But supporters say the benefits outweigh the costs to bring back a beloved natural wonder, a lost valley in Yosemite National Park that Sierra Club founder John Muir called, “one of nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples.”

The fate of Hetch Hetchy is by far the biggest water-related item on any U.S. ballot, but it is not the only one.

More than half the states and many municipalities allow citizens to vote directly on matters of public policy. Ballot measures, initiatives, and referenda in this election cycle that touch on different water matters — disposal of wastewater from hydraulic fracturing, financing new infrastructure, desalination, and public control of water systems, to name a few — will be put before voters in Maine and Oklahoma, as well as those in big cities and small towns in California, Illinois, North Carolina, and Ohio.

The billions of dollars of potential investment that are on the table next week are representative of the slow devolution of infrastructure spending from the federal level to states, counties, and municipal governments.

Ever since a surge of spending in the 1970s following the Clean Water Act — which turned 40 last week — federal assistance has been chopped down and replaced with ratepayer dollars. Recently, Congress balked at establishing a national infrastructure bank and has cut the amount of money flowing into the federal funds for drinking water and wastewater projects.

Yet, most Americans support water investments:

• A 2010 survey from ITT, a manufacturing company based in White Plains, New York, found that 85 percent of voters agreed that federal, state, or local governments should invest in water system improvements, and 63 percent were willing to pay 11 percent more on their water bills to do so.
• Just last week, polling commissioned by global technology giant General Electric (GE) revealed that 84 percent of people surveyed thought that water resources should be a national priority.

As this election shows, even though Congress may have lost its appetite for investment and the presidential candidates are politely looking away, a hunger for reliable water still exists among the electorate.

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Photo credit: Akshay Davis via Flickr

by Francis Gassert and Robert Kimball, via WRI’s Insights

The days leading up to Hurricane Sandy’s landfall were a testament to the power of global data systems in helping to understand and manage risks that natural phenomena can create. A vast, worldwide network of weather monitoring stations and sophisticated remote sensing allowed meteorologists to track and predict Sandy’s progress—and give ample warning to those of us in the hurricane’s path.

The map below is one way to visualize the global data network that makes such analysis possible. It shows Integrated Surface Database (ISD) stations, a widely distributed network of weather stations that all report regularly to a centralized hub.

Like extreme weather events, water scarcity creates impacts that range widely and rarely adhere to political boundaries. Despite these concerns, we lack a water equivalent to the ISD – a standardized, global dataset that would allow decisionmakers to see the whole picture of water scarcity.

The closest thing we have is the Global Runoff Data Center (GRDC), visualized in the map below. The white areas show places where data on water availability is not reported at all, either due to the cost and difficulty of collecting data or a desire to keep that data confidential. As the preponderance of yellow and red points on the map indicate, many of the monitoring stations that are in place do not report with the regularity needed to be truly helpful (compare that to the ISD map, where all the purple dots represent data reported within the last year). The absence of robust global datasets on water availability makes it difficult to understand where and how scarcity and other water risks are emerging around the world.

However, with advanced hydrological modeling techniques and observations from space, it is possible to generate meaningful information in spite of existing data gaps. The World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct project’s newest global maps, launching in January of 2013, do just that: employing the best available techniques and data to provide high-resolution, global perspective on the complexity of water risk. By employing these new and sophisticated techniques, Aqueduct’s new maps are able to extract the most information possible from what limited data is available on global water availability and use.

Nonetheless, nothing beats on-the-ground observations about where water is and where it is being used. As water issues become more pressing across the globe, they act as a signal that governments must do a better job of collecting—and sharing—water data.

Francis Gassert is a Research Assistant in the Markets and Enterprise Program. Robert Kimball is an Associate with the Markets and Enterprise Program. This story is part of the “Aqueduct Sneak Peek” series. Aqueduct Sneak Peek provides an early look at the Aqueduct team’s updated global water risk maps, which will be released in January 2013.