by Peyton Fleming

No matter the place — California’s Central Valley, southern Nevada, the Colorado River, the Southern Plains — water is harder to find across much of the West. And, with energy demand and populations growing, once-unfathomable choices about water pricing and the future of agriculture are unavoidable.

“Agriculture cannot be sustained in the Southern High Plains,” Judy Reeves, senior hydrogeologist at Texas-based Cirrus Associates said flatly, speaking at the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference in water-stressed Lubbock, Texas where drought is still a daily topic. “We really need to start talking about the next economy here.”

“Water from the Colorado River is over-allocated. Legally, there is no water left,” added Kristen Averyt, associate director for science at the University of Colorado. “You really have to ask, ‘Will there be enough water to go around?’”

Chilling words. Reeves noted that the Ogallala Aquifer, the vast groundwater supply for the Southern High Plains, is losing a foot of water each year; during last year’s devastating drought, it lost more than two feet. Even with new first-ever limits on agriculture withdrawals from the aquifer, Reeves believes West Texas farming does not have a long-term future.

But what can water managers in West Texas and elsewhere in the arid West do to navigate these dire water challenges? Some interesting — and surprising — answers were provided at last week’s SEJ workshop, “Squeezing Blood from a Desert.”

Reality-based water pricing is a critical first step. Western water has historically been under priced, in large part because the federal government financed most of the region’s expensive water infrastructure, including pipelines and dams. But, as Sharene Leurig, water program manager at sustainability advocacy group Ceres said, “the era of federal largesse has passed.” That means Western utility water rates and revenues will need to be aligned with short- and long-term expenses. That means higher water rates.

But tools are available to curb water price inflation. Among the most appealing are strong demand management programs. By using carrots and sticks to reduce water use — especially for water-sapping lawns and landscaping — utilities can avoid having to finance expensive new water supplies.

There are many success stories to point to. Lubbock reduced household water use by 25 percent by using drought restrictions and tiered pricing. San Antonio reduced its water use by 100 million gallons a day without having to raise its water rates. These efforts had enormous benefits in helping both cities weather last year’s drought. Other cities such as Midland, Texas, which paid short shrift to demand management, saw two of its three reservoirs decline below one percent, leading to the utility’s credit rating being downgraded by Moody’s, which cited reduced water sales revenues and an uncertain supply recovery. (A lower credit rating means significantly higher borrowing costs for Midland’s utility which is building new treatment facility to turn wastewater into drinking water.)

Moody’s action against Midland raises two additional important points. The first is that credit rating firms are looking more closely at financial challenges that Western water utilities are facing, including water availability constraints, infrastructure financing challenges and the extent to which they’re using water conservation as a buffer against current and future supply shocks. This is a very positive development because these issues in the past have been largely overlooked by credit rating firms, key gatekeepers in evaluating utilities’ financial health.

The second key point is declining water demand. For many years, US utilities have based their financial assumptions on growing volume sales. Depending on the water utility, as much as 80 percent of a system’s revenue can be volume dependent. But now, demand is declining — not just in Midland, Texas, but all across the United States.

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by Donald Carr

The Food and Environmental Reporting Network released a striking report this week (Sept. 18) describing how industrial agriculture and climate change are fueling massive blooms of toxic algae:

Blooms have closed lake beaches or led to swimming advisories from Vermont’s Lake Champlain to Dorena Reservoir in Oregon and from Florida’s Caloosahatchee River to Wisconsin’s Lake Menomin. In addition to the health risks, the blooms take an economic toll. An estimate by Walter Dodds of Kansas State University conservatively puts the annual cost of freshwater algal blooms at more than $1 billion from lost recreation and depressed property values.

A slideshow of horrific images of water tainted by agriculture pollution accompanied the report.

The report noted that no federal agency tracks the occurrence of freshwater algal blooms, but experts say they’re getting worse, driven by fertilizer and manure running off farm fields and into lakes and streams. Earth’s warming climate multiplies the effects.

Dead zones in the oceans are also a direct result of the farm chemicals that pour off agricultural land. The most notorious is the one in the Gulf of Mexico, which grew to the size of New Jersey before the current drought. As a 2007 report by MSNBC described:

The nation’s corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, it makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to a growing “dead zone” – a 7,900-square-mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs and shrimp suffocate.

Industrial agriculture, not manufacturing, gas drilling or mining, is the largest contributor to America’s water pollution problem. And despite its high cost to taxpayers and businesses, most farm operations are exempt from the federal Clean Water Act, and state governments have little authority to compel farmers to control contamination from their fields.

Iowa, in particular, is a major contributor to the Gulf dead zone, and state Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey recently copped to the economic impact that its farmers’ pollution has on Gulf fisheries and the jobs that depend on them:

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by Mindy Selman, via the World Resources Institute

Our water systems are currently being threatened by the crops we grow and food we produce. In many countries, agriculture is the leading source of nutrient pollution in waterways—a situation that’s expected to worsen as the global population increases and the demand for food grows.

So it’s timely that next week’s World Water Week, an annual conference organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute, is focusing on water and food security.

WRI’s water quality team will be in Stockholm next week to discuss this very topic at a side event entitled, “Securing Water Quality While Providing Food Security: The Nutrient Question,” an event co-organized by Water Environment Federation and Environmental Defense Fund. This session, which takes place on August 29th, will build on the work WRI’s water quality team has done with its partner, Dr. Bob Diaz at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, to evaluate the scale and scope of global nutrient-related water quality challenges, including how these issues are driven by agriculture.

Eutrophication: A Growing Problem

Nutrient pollution in water, or eutrophication, is a problem that’s grown exponentially in the past 50 years. While nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus are needed to grow food and maintain healthy ecosystems, too many of these substances can cause havoc in freshwater and coastal ecosystems. Fertilizers and manure from agricultural fields, as well as sewage and runoff from our urban centers are increasingly making their way into waterways, polluting these bodies of water with excessive amounts of nutrients.

Too many nutrients in the water can fuel large algae blooms, including toxic algae. This algae can smother the coral reefs and sea grasses that provide valuable habitat for aquatic species, result in fish kills, and shift the structure of aquatic ecosystems. Plus, when algae blooms die, they suck oxygen out of the water. Under the right conditions, these die-offs create hypoxic areas or dead zones, areas where fish and other aquatic creatures cannot survive. Globally, eutrophication of coastal systems has risen from fewer than 75 systems in 1960 to more than 800 systems today. Of these, more than 500 have experienced hypoxia.

In many nations–including the U.S.–agriculture is the largest source of nutrients to our aquatic systems. Beginning in the early 20th century, people perfected a process for converting non-reactive forms of nitrogen into reactive forms that can be used as fertilizers. This spurred the Green Revolution, leading to a boom of fertilizer use and greatly increased crop yields.

But agricultural intensification had many unintended environmental consequences. Over the past 100 years, human activities have tripled the levels of phosphorus and doubled the levels of reactive nitrogen in the environment compared to natural levels. However, much of the nitrogen and phosphorus used to grow crops washes into rivers and streams during rainstorms or gets released into the atmosphere. Only 20 percent of the nitrogen used in agricultural production is actually consumed as food–the rest is lost to the environment, eventually making its way into our lakes, rivers and estuaries.

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by Peter Lehner, via NRDC’s Switchboard

Waste is just that – a waste.  A waste of time, money, and valuable resources, like food, clean water, fertile soil, or energy.

As pointless as waste is, and as much as we dislike it, it is all around us. We waste almost half the food we grow or raise. We waste more than half our energy through inefficiency, we waste three-quarters of our fuel in gas guzzlers, we waste water in our homes, our towns, our factories and farms. The list goes on and on.

None of this waste makes our lives better. It makes things measurably worse. Waste’s corrosive effects reach beyond our own pocketbooks and into our communities, our nation, and the world at large.  Wasting oil jeopardizes our national security. Wasting food creates social unrest.  Wasting energy poisons our air and water and sickens our families.

The good news is that we can dramatically reduce waste without in any way lowering our standard of living. After all – it’s waste!  We can stop waste at home and where we work or play or learn. Our towns can stop waste; our states and national government can stop waste. Our businesses can stop waste. Everyone can get in on the action.

Individual efforts can make a big difference to your own bottom line, and can have a ripple throughout your community as well. Once you start, say, turning off lights when you leave a room, you might get the idea to buy a motion sensor to save energy. Your friend sees it, likes it, and asks for it at the local hardware store. The store starts stocking lots of motion sensors, maybe adding some different brands. Soon, there are ripples going up the supply chain. Soon, you’re asking why your kid’s school doesn’t have motion sensors, and your individual action is creating change across your community.

We explored what might happen if every American took about a dozen pretty easy steps to reduce waste, and found it would reduce global warming pollution by a billion tons–the same effect as eliminating the carbon emissions of 200 million cars, or 200 coal-fired power plants.

If we recovered just 5 percent of the food we waste, we could feed 4 million Americans. We can save more oil than we currently import from the Gulf simply by making our cars more fuel-efficient. We already know how to construct green buildings that consume as much as 90 percent less energy than conventional ones.

Across the country, innovative solutions are being put in place to trim waste and boost efficiency, in ways that touch all of our lives. These efficient solutions are helping shore up bottom lines, save taxpayer money, create more attractive products, and make the most out of our valuable, and increasingly limited, natural resources.

Over the next few months, I’ll be highlighting smart ways to stop waste, as well as the people, towns, businesses and industries that are saving money and resources—and building success–through efficiency.

Peter Lehner is the Executive Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and was reprinted with permission.

by Sentrawoods via Flickr

Typically, at moderate sizes, power generated by dams and reservoirs is considered “green.” However, a new study from Washington State University has found that during times of drawdown — a period in which the water level behind a dam is rapidly lowered — temperate reservoirs can produce up 20 times more methane than normal.

Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere over 100-year period, and is a hundred times more potent over 20 years. It is produced naturally in reservoirs thanks to biological activity.

During drawdowns, though, when layers of decaying plants, among other things, are exposed, the amount of methane in the water column skyrockets. According to the study:

“Bridget Deemer, a doctoral student at Washington State University-Vancouver, measured dissolved gases in the water column of Lacamas Lake in Clark County and found methane emissions jumped 20-fold when the water level was drawn down. A fellow WSU-Vancouver student, Maria Glavin, sampled bubbles rising from the lake mud and measured a 36-fold increase in methane during a drawdown.”

Though researchers have long known that methane levels spike in reservoirs during drawdown, this study was the first to show the relationship and put a number on the actual methane emissions.

A 2011 study published in the science journal Science found that the “ability of terrestrial ecosystems to act as carbon sinks,” which contain greenhouse gasses and keep them out of the atmosphere, could be up to one quarter less than previously thought when the greenhouse gas release from reservoirs is taken into consideration.

Clearly, the problem is not negligible — particularly when we consider the number of mega-dams being constructed around the world. International Rivers explains:

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We are currently using 3.5 times the water resources supplied by aquifers, according to new research on our global “groundwater footprint” just published in the Journal Nature.

According to the researchers, nearly 1.7 billion people live in areas where groundwater is under threat. Interestingly, it’s only a handful of aquifers contributing to the problem.

“80 per cent of aquifers have a groundwater footprint that is less than their area, meaning that the net global value is driven by a few heavily overexploited aquifers,” write the researchers.

The scary map below illustrates just how depleted those few overexploited groundwater resources are:

The 20th century was characterized by the frenzied acquisition, storage, and use of oil. But many experts believe that the 21st century will be remembered as the century of water.

One of the most alarming emerging issues is the symbiotic — and often conflicting — relationship between electricity generation and water.

A new report called “Burning Our Rivers: The Water Footprint of Electricity” details this relationship, illustrating the massive amounts of water resources used for electricity generation — particularly from fossil fuels and nuclear.

An average U.S. household’s monthly energy use (weighted by cooling technology and fuel mix) requires 39,829 gallons of water, or five times more than the direct residential water use of that same household…. Electricity—as we generate it today—depends heavily on access to free water. The impact to our freshwater resources is an external cost of electrical production. What the market considers ‘least cost’ electricity is often the most water intensive.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 53 percent of all the fresh surface water withdrawn for human consumption in 2005 was used for electricity generation.

While consumption in the U.S. is falling, coal is still the most dominant source of power in the country. It is also the single largest consumer of water resources:

A MWh of electricity generated by coal withdraws approximately 16,052 gallons and consumes approximately 692 gallons of water…. On average (a weighted average taking into account the current mix of cooling technologies being used at coal plants in the U.S.), coal-fired electricity requires the withdrawal of approximately 13,515 gallons and the consumption of 482 gallons of water per MWh for cooling purposes.

The water not used directly for power generation is used in mining coal and other treatment before burning, creating millions of gallons of “sludge” that can potentially pollute freshwater supplies.

Nuclear power is not much better:

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Global warming will force a reduction in nuclear and coal electricity generation over the coming decades as a decline in freshwater resources makes it more difficult to cool thermoelectric power plants, say researchers.

A new study published today in the journal Nature Climate Change projects that thermoelectric generation could fall by 4.4 to 16 percent in the U.S. between 2031 and 2060 due to a lack of adequate cooling water. Thermoelectric plants make up roughly 90 percent of the U.S. electricity mix — sucking up 40 percent of the nation’s freshwater supplies.

The researchers also projected a steeper decline in Europe, which could see a 19 percent dip in generation.

For cooling-water use, the combination of decreases in low river flows and increases in (especially high) water temperature is problematic. We used daily water temperature projections to calculate the mean number of days per year that water temperature is predicted to exceed the inlet limits of river water for cooling water use of 23 °C (Europe) and 27 °C (US). The increase in the number of days per year with water temperature exceeding 23 °C is generally highest for southern Europe (median of 44–48 (59–82) days per year for B1–A2 scenario for the 2040s (2080s) relative to 23 days for 1971–2000). The same magnitude of increase in number of days with water temperatures exceeding 27 °C is found for the south and southeastern US. Combined with projected decreases in low river flows of more than 25% in these regions, cooling-water problems are expected to be exacerbated substantially in the future.

The researchers also found that the likelihood of “extreme reductions” in electricity production of 90% or more at plants could increase by three-fold.

This emerging conflict is just one more headache for the ailing nuclear and coal industries in the U.S.

It’s been 16 years since a nuclear power plant was built in America. Southern Company is currently constructing a new plant in Georgia; however, the company recently reported that the project — once hailed as the start of a “renaissance” in nuclear — will cost almost $1 billion more than expected.

The coal industry has seen a steep decline in production, falling from 44.6 percent of U.S. electricity generation to 36 percent in just one year. A combination of aging infrastructure, cost-competitive renewables, new clean air regulations, and a strong anti-coal movement are quickly reducing the attractiveness of coal.

A warming planet will only accelerate the problems faced in these industries. The decline in adequate cooling water resources will force longer shutdowns, thus increasing the cost of electricity and raising more local environmental conflicts.

by Mindy Lubber, via Ceres

This weekend in theaters in Los Angeles, and in coming weeks in Phoenix, San Diego and Atlanta, a powerful new documentary premiers. Look closely at the early screening locations and you just might guess the topic: water scarcity.

“Last Call at the Oasis” does far more than recount the alarming woes of our country’s most water-stressed regions; it’s a beautifully produced, detailed picture of an immense global crisis bearing down on us as we speak – and thankfully a roadmap of sorts to what we can do about it.

I hesitate these days to even string together words like “immense global crisis” – there’s much crisis fatigue, and so many people and issues screaming for our attention.

But water’s one of the really big issues – we literally can’t live without it, our economies depend on it and in many regions supplies are running short. Two billion people are already being affected by water shortages. Population growth and climate change add even more pressure to the situation.

In America, where clean water is taken for granted, it’s far too easy to forget this reality. But if we can view what’s portrayed in “Last Call” as a giant opportunity to change our world for the better, it just might infuse us with hope and energy instead of dread.

One of the experts interviewed in “Last Call” frames a key source of our problem with water. “We think of it as the air,” says Robert Glennon, a law professor at University of Arizona, “infinite and inexhaustible.”

But it’s neither – even in hydrologically-blessed countries like our own.

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by Manish Bapna and Betsy Otto, via WRI Insights Aqueduct

It’s rare for water to make waves at the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering of business leaders and finance ministers.

But the most recent Davos summit was an exception. A new eye-opening report ranked water supply among the top five global risks in terms of impact– on par with systemic financial failure and fiscal imbalances.

As we mark World Water Day, the alarming statistics underlying water scarcity are worth repeating. Worldwide 2.7 billion people are currently affected by water shortages. As the global population races toward 8 billion and beyond, upward trends in food demand and economic growth promise to further strain freshwater resources, especially in the developing world. Climate change, of course, is exacerbating these water challenges.

Clean, abundant water is essential for life and economic growth. Since it is a finite resource, we need to find solutions that will ensure we can use water more efficiently and mange water systems more wisely.

Making this happen is easier said than done. Success depends on the recognition of three essential characteristics. That is, water risk is: multi-dimensional; local; and requires a collective response.

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