Tag Archives: water security

Traditional research outputs like journal articles don’t often give voice to communities’ stories.

Groundwater is the second-largest store of water on Earth. Governments and industry use groundwater reservoirs to store waste, but it may also have environmental functions that haven’t been revealed.

Four decades of federal, state and local conservation efforts have mainly targeted individual farmers, providing ways for them to voluntarily reduce water use or adopt more water-efficient technologies. While these initiatives are important, they haven’t stemmed the aquifer’s decline.

The high plains aquifer, also known as the Ogallala aquifer, is one of the largest in the nation and the primary source of water for a vast stretch of our agricultural heartland. But what exactly is an aquifer, and how does it work? Many imagine a giant underground lake—in fact, the Ogallala is sometimes referred to as the sixth Great …

Lack of a domestic vision for water in South Asia reinforces the zero-sum nature of international water disputes. India’s neighbors hold overwhelmingly negative views of New Delhi. But the election of the first single-party government for 30 years gives India an opportunity both for more coherent policy towards water and to explore opportunities for mutually-beneficial approaches to water with its smaller neighbors.

Have you heard? The world is running out of accessible clean water.   Humanity is polluting, mismanaging, and displacing our finite freshwater sources at an alarming rate. Since 1990, half the rivers in China have disappeared. The Ogallala Aquifer that supplies the U.S. breadbasket will be gone “in our lifetime,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.   By 2030, global demand …

There is a popular, tongue-in-cheek saying in America — attributed to the writer Mark Twain, who lived through the early phase of the California Water Wars — that “whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.” It highlights the consequences, even if somewhat apocryphally, as ever-scarcer water resources create a parched world. California currently is reeling under its …

Central Asian water conservation specialists are discussing supply problems and ways to overcome them.   The region has strong incentives to save the precious resource, they say, noting that it has ample water resources but uneven distribution. Discussions frequently lead to quarrels rather than to solutions. Border disputes, the threat of extremism, and water disputes are among the region’s primary …