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It all started with a Lost Boy of Sudan who just kept walking...

Water for South Sudan began when a Lost Boy from a rural village in southwestern Sudan returned home, only to find his father fighting deadly waterborne parasites.

After seeing his father's condition, Salva decided to take matters into his own hands and help his community access better water, sanitation, and hygiene practices.

And today, we call this movement Water for South Sudan!

5 MILLION

people in South Sudan live without daily access to safe water and sanitation services.

3.7 MILES
Children, often girls, spend their days walking for water. They walk an average of 3.7 miles per trip. Sometimes they make multiple trips to obtain water, carrying up to 40 pounds (18 kgs) of water each time.

10 PERCENT
of people in South Sudan have access to basic sanitation services

20 Years of Watering the Seeds of Change

Water Wells

We help drill, maintain, and restore water wells so the people in South Sudan have access to clean water all year-round.

Hygiene

We make sure to educate communities about hygiene so that the clean water from existing wells doesn't get contaminated due to poor hygiene practices.

Sanitation

Our sanitation program makes sure people have access to latrines so communities can prevent the spread of diseases.

Subscribe to The Wellspring, our monthly newsletter.

Stay up-to-date with our news and events.

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people in South Sudan live without daily access to safe water and sanitation services. Children, often girls, spend their days walking for water. They walk an average of 3.7 miles per trip. Sometimes they make multiple trips to obtain water, carrying up to 40 pounds (18 kgs) of water each time.

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Innovative Filtration System Makes Clean Water Accessible

For many people, water filters are nearly a requirement to have in the household. In general, they are able to eliminate some of the runoff that lands in the liquid from treatment centers and through the kitchen faucet. Sadly, as great as these filters are, they aren't as effective over time and many users don't perform maintenance on a regular basis with them. That's paved the way for a new reusable filter that nearly cleans out all the problems that could be in our water.

The Barron Research Group at Rice University has come up with SENT, or a supported-epoxidized carbon nanotube. It has the ability to eliminate over 99 percent of heavy metal contaminants that are hazardous to our health. This could be anything from mercury, arsenic, thallium, and commonly lead. It's important to monitor how much goes into our bodies as it can cause heart disease, birth defects, dementia, and other unfortunate symptoms.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets maximum concentration levels for these metals. Older homes and places with an older pipe system are more prone to have one of the more toxic metals, lead. Anything above a level of 0.005 milligrams per liter of lead is considered extremely hazardous.

SENT's filter could be confused with a piece of cotton, and one amazing benefit is the ability to be reused. Andrew R. Barron, head of the researchers in the project, told ResearchGate that the process was pretty simple once the plan was in place. The team "grew carbon nanotubes onto quartz wool, then epoxidized them to make them active to adsorb metal ions." Then, they found out "vinegar reacts with the metal in solution to adsorb it."

"Adsorb" shouldn't be confused with "absorb." The former relates to the metal forming along the surface of the wool. The filter also is able to regenerate to add efficiency and be reused. In their testing, they were able to eliminate 99.4 percent of heavy metals from 83,000 liters of heavily contaminated water with just one gram of their product. That one gram could cost as little as 25 cents.

Thanks to the cheap costs, this would be a viable solution to clean waters in Mexico and developing countries. The country just below the United States mostly drinks some form of packaged water. Places like Ghana and Congo have limited sanitary facilities, while 40 percent of the Ugandan population has to travel 30 minutes to get fresh water.

Barron mentioned two reasons in the ResearchGate interview on why they put so much effort into the study: "First, was the desire to be able to remove toxic metals from drinking water in remote locations that didn't have power. The second was the Fukushima disaster, where there was a need to remove complex radioactive metal waste."

Cheap and efficient options are coming to help keep water safe to drink. 3D-printed monitoring systems would be a great accompaniment to the SENT filter system to provide the best information about H2O. This would also be beneficial to many areas in the United States, especially those that live in more isolated towns, have older pipes, or have gone through a crisis like the citizens in Flint, Michigan.

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Innovative Filtration System Makes Clean Water Accessible

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A team of Rice University scientists could have invented a more efficient and reliable way to remove toxins in our water. This filtering system, which looks like a ball of cotton, can remove over 99 percent of heavy metal contaminants and can regenerate itself.

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This machine makes planting a breeze !  INSIDER inventions

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Ethiopian girls carrying water. Waterdotorg, CC BY-NC-SA

Imagine going through your day without access to clean, safe water in your home for drinking, cooking, washing or bathing whenever you need it. According to a new report from UNICEF and the World Health Organization, 2.1 billion people around the world face that challenge every day. And the task of providing water for households falls disproportionately to women and girls, especially in rural areas.

Water, a human right, is critical for human survival and development. A sufficient supply of biologically and chemically safe water is necessary for drinking and personal hygiene to prevent diarrheal diseases, trachoma, intestinal worm infections, stunted growth among children and numerous other deleterious outcomes from chemical contaminants like arsenic and lead.

I have carried out research in India, Bolivia and Kenya on the water and sanitation challenges that women and girls confront and how these experiences influence their lives. In my field work I have seen adolescent girls, pregnant women and mothers with small children carrying water. Through interviews, I have learned of the hardships they face when carrying out this obligatory task.

An insufficient supply of safe and accessible water poses extra risks and challenges for women and girls. Without recognizing the uneven burden of water work that women bear, well-intentioned programs to bring water to places in need will continue to fail to meet their goals.

Lost hours

Collecting water takes time. Simply to get water for drinking, bathing, cooking and other household needs, millions of women and girls spend hours every day traveling to water sources, waiting in line and carrying heavy loads - often several times a day.

The new UNICEF/WHO report states that 263 million people worldwide have access to water sources that are considered safe, but need to spend at least 30 minutes walking or queuing to collect their water. Another 159 million get their water from surface sources that are considered to be the most unsafe, such as rivers, streams and ponds. Water from these sources is even more likely to require over 30 minutes to collect.

UN WOMEN, CC BY-NC-ND

In a study of 25 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, UNICEF estimated that women there spent 16 million hours collecting water each day. Women in a recent study in Kenya reported spending an average of 4.5 hours fetching water per week, causing 77 percent to worry about their safety while fetching and preventing 24 percent from caring for their children.

When children or other family members get sick from consuming poor-quality water, which can happen even if the water is initially clean when collected, women spend their time providing care. These responsibilities represent lost opportunities for women's employment, education, leisure or sleep.

Heavy loads

Water is heavy. The World Health Organization recommends 20-50 liters of water per person per day for drinking, cooking and washing. That amounts to hauling between 44 and 110 pounds of water daily for use by each household member.

And in many places, water sources are far from homes. In Asia and Africa, women walk an average of 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) per day collecting water. Carrying such loads over long distances can result in strained backs, shoulders and necks, and other injuries if women have to walk over uneven and steep terrain or on busy roads.

The burden is even heavier for women who are pregnant or are also carrying small children. Moreover, pregnant women worry that transporting these heavy loads will lead to early labor or even miscarriage.

Even when a household or village has access to a safe water source close to home, residents may not use it if they believe the water is inferior in some way. As one woman told my research team in India:

Tube well water quality is not good... water is saline. Cooking is not good due to this water. Not good for drinking either. People are getting water from that neighbouring village.... for cooking we get water from the river.

In this community, the neighboring village was at least a kilometer away.

Fetching water can also be very dangerous for women and girls. They can face conflict at water points and the risk of physical or sexual assault. Many of these dangers also arise when women do not have access to safe, clean and private toilets or latrines for urinating, defecating and managing menstruation.

Water.org, CC BY-SA

Global demand for water is increasing. The United Nations forecasts that if current water use patterns do not change, world demand will exceed supply by 40 percent by 2030. In such a scenario, it is hard to imagine that women's and girls' experiences will improve without intentional efforts.

A focus on women's needs

When communities initiate programs to improve access to water, it is critical to ask women about their needs and experiences. Although women and girls play key roles in obtaining and managing water globally, they are rarely offered roles in water improvement programs or on local water committees. They need to be included as a right and as a practical matter. Numerous water projects in developing countries have failed because they did not include women.

And women should play meaningful roles. A study in northern Kenya found that although women served on local water management committees, conflict with men at water points persisted because the women often were not invited to meetings or were not allowed to speak.

Women who raise their voices about water concerns need to be heard. In Flint, Michigan, women were critical to revealing the city's water crisis and continue to push for changes.

We also need broader strategies to reduce gender disparities in water access. First we need to collect more data on women's water burden and how it affects their their health, well-being and personal development. Second, women must be involved in creating and managing targeted programs to mitigate these risks. Third, these programs should be evaluated to determine whether they are truly improving women's lives. And finally, social messaging affirming the idea that water work belongs only to women must be abandoned.

Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called empowerment of the world's women " a global imperative." To attain that goal, we must reduce the weight of water on women's shoulders.
Editor's note: This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 22, 2016.

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Women still carry most of the world's water

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Imagine going through your day without access to clean, safe water in your home for drinking, cooking, washing or bathing whenever you need it. According to a new report from UNICEF and the World Health Organization, 2.1 billion people around the world face that challenge every day.

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Los Angeles can't make it rain, but it can shield its precious water with "shade balls" -- 96 million of them to be exact.

For months, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has been releasing the black plastic balls to float on the surface of the 175-acre Los Angeles Reservoir in a massive drought relief project. The final 20,000 went in on Monday, with some assistance from LA Mayor Eric Garcetti.

By deflecting UV rays, the opaque spheres are expected to protect more than 300 million gallons of water from evaporating in Southern California's harsh sunlight every year.

LADWP was the first utility company to use this technology to protect water, according to a press release from Garcetti.

"In the midst of California's historic drought, it takes bold ingenuity to maximize my goals for water conservation," the mayor said. "This effort by LADWP is emblematic of the kind of creative thinking we need to meet those challenges."

Besides slowing evaporation, the shade balls prevent sunlight from triggering a dangerous reaction between bromite, a chemical occurring naturally in groundwater, and the chlorine used to disinfect the water. When sunlight interacts with those two chemicals, Plastic News explains, the suspected carcinogen bromate is formed.

The shade balls also deter wildlife from contaminating the reservoir, shield the water from wind-blow dust and discourage algae from forming on the water's surface.

City officials hailed the shade balls as very cost-effective. They run just 36 cents a piece, The Guardian noted, and require no additional construction or maintenance -- except to be rotated occasionally.

"Shade balls are a great example of how engineering meets common sense," LADWP general manager Marcie Edwards said in Garcetti's press release. "... As we make updates, we are mindful to be wise and practical with our investments. Shade balls are an affordable and effective way to comply with regulations, and help us continue to deliver the best drinking water to our customers."

Watching the shade balls cascade into LA's largest reservoir is also completely mesmerizing. Take a look at the photos below:

But the shade ball technology doesn't mean Los Angelenos can ease off their water conservation efforts. After a snowpack measure in the Sierra Nevada mountains in April revealed levels at a record low 6 percent of the long-term average for that time of the year, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) announced California's first-ever statewide mandatory water cutbacks, and those remain in effect.

Money could soon become available for bigger projects. Last month, California's two Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, introduced emergency drought legislation in Congress, aimed at supporting other water projects in their dry state and helping poor rural communities that face severe water shortages.

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Millions Of 'Shade Balls' Protect LA's Water During Drought

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Los Angeles can't make it rain, but it can shield its precious water with "shade balls" -- 96 million of them to be exact. For months, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has been releasing the black plastic balls to float on the surface of the 175-acre Los Angeles Reservoir in a massive drought relief project.

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The Carlsbad Desalination Project is the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. Located in Carlsbad, California it converts sea water into 50 million gallons of drinkable water per day. Learn more at our site or come for a tour.

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Tips to Use Less Plastic - Green Education Foundation | GEF | Sustainability Education

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As part of the Waste Reduction Challenge, try cutting back on the amount of plastic you use.

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Microplastic contamination has been found in tap water in countries around the world, leading to calls from scientists for urgent research on the implications for health.

Scores of tap water samples from more than a dozen nations were analysed by scientists for an investigation by Orb Media, who shared the findings with the Guardian. Overall, 83% of the samples were contaminated with plastic fibres.

The US had the highest contamination rate, at 94%, with plastic fibres found in tap water sampled at sites including Congress buildings, the US Environmental Protection Agency's headquarters, and Trump Tower in New York. Lebanon and India had the next highest rates.

European nations including the UK, Germany and France had the lowest contamination rate, but this was still 72%. The average number of fibres found in each 500ml sample ranged from 4.8 in the US to 1.9 in Europe.

The new analyses indicate the ubiquitous extent of microplastic contamination in the global environment. Previous work has been largely focused on plastic pollution in the oceans, which suggests people are eating microplastics via contaminated seafood.

"We have enough data from looking at wildlife, and the impacts that it's having on wildlife, to be concerned," said Dr Sherri Mason, a microplastic expert at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who supervised the analyses for Orb. "If it's impacting [wildlife], then how do we think that it's not going to somehow impact us?"

A magnified image of clothing microfibres from washing machine effluent. One study found that a fleece jacket can shed as many as 250,000 fibres per wash. Photograph: Courtesy of Rozalia Project

A separate small study in the Republic of Ireland released in June also found microplastic contamination in a handful of tap water and well samples. "We don't know what the [health] impact is and for that reason we should follow the precautionary principle and put enough effort into it now, immediately, so we can find out what the real risks are," said Dr Anne Marie Mahon at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, who conducted the research.

Mahon said there were two principal concerns: very small plastic particles and the chemicals or pathogens that microplastics can harbour. "If the fibres are there, it is possible that the nanoparticles are there too that we can't measure," she said. "Once they are in the nanometre range they can really penetrate a cell and that means they can penetrate organs, and that would be worrying." The Orb analyses caught particles of more than 2.5 microns in size, 2,500 times bigger than a nanometre.

Microplastics can attract bacteria found in sewage, Mahon said: "Some studies have shown there are more harmful pathogens on microplastics downstream of wastewater treatment plants."

Plastic fibres found in tap water across the world

Microplastics are also known to contain and absorb toxic chemicals and research on wild animals shows they are released in the body. Prof Richard Thompson, at Plymouth University, UK, told Orb: "It became clear very early on that the plastic would release those chemicals and that actually, the conditions in the gut would facilitate really quite rapid release." His research has shown microplastics are found in a third of fish caught in the UK.

The scale of global microplastic contamination is only starting to become clear, with studies in Germany finding fibres and fragments in all of the 24 beer brands they tested, as well as in honey and sugar. In Paris in 2015, researchers discovered microplastic falling from the air, which they estimated deposits three to 10 tonnes of fibres on the city each year, and that it was also present in the air in people's homes.

This research led Frank Kelly, professor of environmental health at King's College London, to tell a UK parliamentary inquiry in 2016: "If we breathe them in they could potentially deliver chemicals to the lower parts of our lungs and maybe even across into our circulation." Having seen the Orb data, Kelly told the Guardian that research is urgently needed to determine whether ingesting plastic particles is a health risk.

The new research tested 159 samples using a standard technique to eliminate contamination from other sources and was performed at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. The samples came from across the world, including from Uganda, Ecuador and Indonesia.

How microplastics end up in drinking water is for now a mystery, but the atmosphere is one obvious source, with fibres shed by the everyday wear and tear of clothes and carpets. Tumble dryers are another potential source, with almost 80% of US households having dryers that usually vent to the open air.

"We really think that the lakes [and other water bodies] can be contaminated by cumulative atmospheric inputs," said Johnny Gasperi, at the University Paris-Est Créteil, who did the Paris studies. "What we observed in Paris tends to demonstrate that a huge amount of fibres are present in atmospheric fallout."

Plastic fibres may also be flushed into water systems, with a recent study finding that each cycle of a washing machine could release 700,000 fibres into the environment. Rains could also sweep up microplastic pollution, which could explain why the household wells used in Indonesia were found to be contaminated.

In Beirut, Lebanon, the water supply comes from natural springs but 94% of the samples were contaminated. "This research only scratches the surface, but it seems to be a very itchy one," said Hussam Hawwa, at the environmental consultancy Difaf, which collected samples for Orb.

This planktonic arrow worm, Sagitta setosa, has eaten a blue plastic fibre about 3mm long. Plankton support the entire marine food chain. Photograph: Richard Kirby/Courtesy of Orb Media

Current standard water treatment systems do not filter out all of the microplastics, Mahon said: "There is nowhere really where you can say these are being trapped 100%. In terms of fibres, the diameter is 10 microns across and it would be very unusual to find that level of filtration in our drinking water systems."

Bottled water may not provide a microplastic-free alternative to tapwater, as the they were also found in a few samples of commercial bottled water tested in the US for Orb.

Almost 300m tonnes of plastic is produced each year and, with just 20% recycled or incinerated, much of it ends up littering the air, land and sea. A report in July found 8.3bn tonnes of plastic has been produced since the 1950s, with the researchers warning that plastic waste has become ubiquitous in the environment.

"We are increasingly smothering ecosystems in plastic and I am very worried that there may be all kinds of unintended, adverse consequences that we will only find out about once it is too late," said Prof Roland Geyer, from the University of California and Santa Barbara, who led the study.

Mahon said the new tap water analyses raise a red flag, but that more work is needed to replicate the results, find the sources of contamination and evaluate the possible health impacts.

She said plastics are very useful, but that management of the waste must be drastically improved: "We need plastics in our lives, but it is us that is doing the damage by discarding them in very careless ways."

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Plastic fibres found in tap water around the world, study reveals

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Microplastic contamination has been found in tap water in countries around the world, leading to calls from scientists for urgent research on the implications for health. Scores of tap water samples from more than a dozen nations were analysed by scientists for an investigation by Orb Media, who shared the findings with the Guardian.

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Death of a River - The Colorado River Delta

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Reading the Ogallala Aquifer: Saving Ancient Water | NBC News

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India receives adequate rainfall for its billion-plus population, but the country is facing a crisis as water is diverted from poor rural areas to fill water tanks and swimming pools in richer cities like Delhi. Jill McGivering reports.

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Lake Mead stores water for the states in the lower Colorado River basin - that's Nevada, Arizona and California. Because Lake Mead has dropped below 1,075 feet, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation can mandate water cuts in Arizona and Nevada.

Climate change, drought and overuse of the Colorado River system are jeopardizing the reliability of this water, which supplies 40 million people in the West. Lake Mead hit its lowest level on record this year, as did the second-largest reservoir in the U.S. - Lake Powell.

A 100-year-old water-sharing agreement means Colorado and the other states in the upper Colorado River basin - New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming - are legally obligated to send a certain amount of water downstream to the lower-basin states and Mexico.

Currently, Colorado and this group of states are complying with the water-sharing agreement. The upper basin is not legally at fault for the low levels in Lake Mead.

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The First-Ever Colorado River Water Shortage Has Been Declared. What Does That Mean For Colorado?

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Lake Mead stores water for the states in the lower Colorado River basin - that's Nevada, Arizona and California. Because Lake Mead has dropped below 1,075 feet, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation can mandate water cuts in Arizona and Nevada.

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40 Million People Rely on the Colorado River, and Now It's Drying Up

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Experts Name the Top 19 Solutions to the Global Freshwater Crisis

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"...Decisions executives make to respond to freshwater scarcity will penetrate almost every aspect of their business operations."

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In 2015, the world watched as a video of 96 million "shade balls" getting dumped into the Los Angeles Reservoir went viral. The purpose of the balls: to improve water quality and save water.

But a new study raises an interesting question: Could saving water in the Los Angeles Reservoir come at the cost of consuming water in other parts of world?

At the time, Californians faced a record-setting drought, and conserving water was on everyone's minds. Mandatory water restrictions led to brown lawns and shorter showers.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said the shade balls could keep contaminants out of the water and reduce the evaporation of the reservoir by 85 to 90 percent during a drought. The officials said the annual savings could amount to up to 300 million gallons of water, enough to supply drinking water to 8,100 people.

But a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Imperial College London and University of Twente in the Netherlands reported Monday that it may take more water to make the shade balls than what they save. To offset this loss, the shade balls must sit on the Los Angeles Reservoir between 1 to 2.5 years.

What the scientists did:

The creators of shade balls originally used them to prevent chemical treatments in the reservoir from reacting with sunlight and creating bromate, which is a carcinogen regulated by the EPA. California began deploying shade balls in 2008 as a cost-effective way to reduce bromate levels and also prevent algae growth. The LA Department of Water and Power picked shade balls over other, more expensive covers for the city's biggest reservoir that would have cost an extra $250 million dollars.

To estimate the amount of water it takes to make shade balls, the MIT team conducted what's known as a "blue" water footprint - an analysis that estimates the amount of water used in the process of manufacturing a product. In this case, the shade balls are made of a plastic called polyethylene.

"We know that high-density polyethylene itself is made using oil, natural gas, and electricity," said Erfan Haghighi, an environmental scientist and mechanical engineer at MIT, and lead author on the paper. "And each of these energy sources are water intensive."

The team found a range of previously published estimates of water use for these three resources. Because manufacturing practices vary around the world, the researchers collected both local values for water consumption and a global average.

Haghighi's team then examined industry reports from plastic manufacturers to determine how much oil, natural gas, and electricity goes into making polyethylene.

From there, they calculated how much plastic, oil, natural gas, electricity and water went into making the 96 million shade balls.

What the scientists found:

Haghighi's team estimated that manufacturing 96 million shade balls required between 66 and 766 million gallons of water - the equivalent of 100 to 1,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. This large range is due to the thickness of the balls, which can vary dramatically.

A 2014 study showed that of all the water saving strategies used in LA in 2010, mandatory restrictions of water use - essentially stopping people from watering their lawns - saved the most water.

This means shade balls would need to stay on the Los Angeles Reservoir for at least a year or more to save water. Depending on exactly where the shade balls are made, it could take up to 2.5 years to recover the water used.

Since shade balls have stayed on the Los Angeles Reservoir since 2015, they are likely now starting to save more water than they cost to produce.

The LA Department of Water and Power said they plan to keep shade balls as a permanent solution to water quality issues on the Los Angeles, replacing them every 10 years. LA officials also deployed shade balls at three other reservoirs, between 2008 and 2012, where they stayed temporarily for five to nine years.

The team cautioned that water savings from the shade balls will likely be less than 300 million gallons during years when there is no drought. That's because evaporation of water decreases when the air isn't as dry. The actual period of time needed to recover water from shade ball manufacturing might even be longer.

The water saved from evaporation by shade balls is small compared to other water-saving strategies, said Aditi Bhaskar, a hydrologist at Colorado State University, who wasn't involved with Haghighi's study.

A 2014 study showed that of all the water saving strategies used in LA in 2010, mandatory restrictions of water use - essentially stopping people from watering their lawns - saved the most water.

"Savings in just May through June 2010 [with mandatory water restrictions] is 10 times larger than the 300 million gallons which they're getting per year for the shade balls," Bhaskar said.

Why it matters:

The shade balls could still be useful during a drought if a reservoir accounts for when and where these shade balls are made, said Jay Lund, director for the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California Davis. If the shade balls, or other water-sapping technologies, are made during periods when water is abundant, the net effect of manufacturing may be zero.

"With water, the impacts are much more local, both in time and space," Lund said "It's quite plausible to manufacture shading materials at a time and a place where water is relatively abundant and employ them to reduce evaporation at a time in the place when water is really valuable."

Haghighi said people need to consider environmental conservation on a global scale, rather than just a local one. They must also consider the entire life cycle of the technology. If the water saving the Los Angeles Reservoir comes at the cost of consuming water in other parts of world, Haghighi said, is it worth it?

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Why 96 million plastic 'shade balls' dumped into the LA Reservoir may not save water

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In 2015, officials poured 96 million "shade balls" into the Los Angeles Reservoir to improve water quality and save water. The video went viral, but those shade balls may have used more water than they saved, MIT scientists reported Monday.

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Modern Methods of Irrigation utilize cloud-automated and timed sprinkler systems, drip systems and subsurface water lines. Using precise, high resolution ET Everywhere weather data, Smart Irrigation Controllers are able to create specific schedules to maintain landscape health, irrigating only when necessary, based on daily, site-specific runtime adjustments. This method of irrigation involves three systems:

Sprinkler System: Water droplets are sprayed or sprinkled like raindrops over landscape through rotating nozzles connected to pipelines. The pipelines are connected perpendicular to a main pipeline laid in the field.

Useful for sandy soil and uneven land

Protects plants/crops from extreme frost or temperature

Fertilizer and insecticide can be applied through sprinkler system

Helps with soil conservation

Drip System: Water flows through narrow pipes laid on the fields and drips through small holes (emitters) directly at the place of plant roots. Roots absorb the water and nourish the plant. There is no water waste with this method, as less water is lost to evaporation, runoff and wind.

Optimizes soil moisture, saving water

Direct hydration of plant roots for plant health

Inhibits weed growth since water is applied directly to plants, not spread around the field

Bacterial growth is limited since area near plants is dry

Subsurface Drip System: When the water table is deep below the ground
surface, plastic drip tubes or trickle emission devices are buried below the soil surface within plant root zones. This low-pressure method of irrigation can reduce water use by 25% compared to above ground sprinkler irrigation, and works well in irregular shaped fields and on slopes.

Saves water and improves plant health by eliminating surface water run-off and evaporation

Reduces weed growth and disease

Useful in hot, dry, windy climates with limited water supply

Also critical is knowing how moist or dry the soil is deep below the ground surface. Here's where another method of Modern Irrigation will save landscaping from being under-watered or overwatered.

Buried deep below the soil surface, Soil Moisture Sensors transmit to the Smart Irrigation Controller how wet or dry the soil is in the root zone, and how much water it needs in real time. These sensitive sensors can read soil moisture within ±3 percent of the actual volumetric soil moisture content.

Another cloud-based Modern Method of Irrigation is Mobile apps, which put control of the Smart Irrigation System in the palm of your hand from anywhere, literally with a tap of the finger.
The Bottom Line....
From timed sprinkler systems to managing your cloud-based Smart Irrigation System on your mobile app- welcome to the present and ever-evolving, technology-driven future of Modern Methods of Irrigation!

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Modern Methods of Irrigation utilize cloud-automated and timed sprinkler systems, drip systems and subsurface water lines. Using precise, high resolution ET Everywhere weather data, Smart Irrigation Controllers are able to create specific schedules to maintain landscape health, irrigating only when necessary, based on daily, site-specific runtime adjustments.

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Shannyn Snyder (Guest Writer)

With a diverse population that is three times the size of the United States but one-third the physical size, India has the second largest population in the world. According to the World Bank, India has taken significant steps to reduce poverty but the number of people who live in poverty is still highly disproportionate to the number of people who are middle-income, with a combined rate of over 52% of both rural and urban poor.

Although India has made improvements over the past decades to both the availability and quality of municipal drinking water systems, its large population has stressed planned water resources and rural areas are left out. In addition, rapid growth in India's urban areas has stretched government solutions, which have been compromised by over-privatization.

Regardless of improvements to drinking water, many other water sources are contaminated with both bio and chemical pollutants, and over 21% of the country's diseases are water-related. Furthermore, only 33% of the country has access to traditional sanitation.

One concern is that India may lack overall long-term availability of replenishable water resources. While India's aquifers are currently associated with replenishing sources, the country is also a major grain producer with a great need for water to support the commodity. As with all countries with large agricultural output, excess water consumption for food production depletes the overall water table.

Many rural communities in India who are situated on the outskirts of urban sprawl also have little choice but to drill wells to access groundwater sources. However, any water system adds to the overall depletion of water. There is no easy answer for India which must tap into water sources for food and human sustenance, but India's overall water availability is running dry.

India's water crisis is often attributed to lack of government planning, increased corporate privatization, industrial and human waste and government corruption. In addition, water scarcity in India is expected to worsen as the overall population is expected to increase to 1.6 billion by year 2050. To that end, global water scarcity is expected to become a leading cause of national political conflict in the future, and the prognosis for India is no different.

On a positive note, some areas of India are fortunate to have a relatively wet climate, even in the most arid regions. However, with no rain catchment programs in place, most of the water is displaced or dried up instead of used. In these areas, rain harvesting could be one solution for water collection. Collected water can be immediately used for agriculture, and with improved filtration practices to reduce water-borne pathogens, also quickly available for human consumption.

Whatever the means, India needs solutions now. Children in 100 million homes in the country lack water, and one out of every two children are malnourished. Environmental justice needs to be restored to India so that families can raise their children with dignity, and providing water to communities is one such way to best ensure that chance.

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Learn about the water crisis facing India. Read about some of the causes and the differences found from one part of India to another.

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The term "water footprint" is used to indicate the amount of fresh water that any given process or activity uses. Growing and processing crops and livestock consumes large quantities of water; therefore, the water footprint of food is high. Animal products, especially, like meat, dairy and eggs (all of which tend to require more water than fruits, vegetables and beans) have an even higher water footprint. Individually speaking, one's diet makes up the largest part of one's personal water footprint. This is why preventing food waste individually matters: because discarded food not only wastes the water that went into producing it, but all other resources involved, as well.

Three Components of Water Footprints

Water footprints were developed by the Water Footprint Network to assess the amount of water (in different types) that is consumed in producing food and other products. Water footprints are composed of three separate calculations:

Blue Water Footprint: The amount of surface water and groundwater required (evaporated or used directly) to produce an item. For food, this refers mainly to crop irrigation.

Green Water Footprint: The amount of rainwater required (evaporated or used directly) to make an item. For food, this refers to dry farming where crops receive only rainwater.

Grey Water Footprint: The amount of fresh water required to dilute pollutants and make water pure enough to meet EPA water quality standards. For food, the water would have become polluted from agricultural runoff or leaching from the soil.

Water, Food and Agriculture

In the United States, agriculture is responsible for 80 percent of all water consumed (through evaporation or other means that remove it from a watershed). It takes a surprising amount of water to grow and process food, because crops cannot grow without water, especially not without irrigation water. In fact, one's diet accounts for more than two thirds of one's own total water footprint, mostly because of all the "virtual water" needed to produce one's food. Virtual water is the "hidden" component in a production process, which contributes to the total water footprint.

A typical lunch-time meal reveals how quickly virtual water adds up, according to data from the Water Footprint Network. One loaf of bread takes about 240 gallons of water to produce, while one pound of cheese takes about 382 gallons. A simple cheese sandwich adds up to about 56 gallons of water. Add some sliced turkey, and the water footprint jumps to 148 gallons. Throw in a small bag of potato chips at 12 gallons and you're up to 160. Include an ice-cold soda at 46, and this typical lunch took 206 gallons of water to produce.

The Water Footprint of Beef and Other Meat

Pound for pound, meat has a much higher water footprint than vegetables, grains or beans. A single pound of beef takes, on average, 1,800 gallons of water to produce. Ninety-eight percent goes to watering the grass, forage and feed that cattle consume over their lifetime. Where cattle diet consists mainly of grain-based feed, such as in industrial livestock production, the blue water footprint is high; where their diet consists mainly of grass and forage, the green water footprint is high.

Industrial Beef vs. Pastured Beef

In the United States, at least 80 percent of beef cattle are "conventionally" raised, meaning that they typically spend six months grazing on pasture, then they go to a feedlot for four to six months where they eat feed made from corn, soy and other grains. While this type of diet speeds up the cattle's growth - a beef steer or heifer can eat 1,000 pounds or more of feed over a few months - it is not without costs. With nearly 29 million head of beef cattle produced in the US (as of 2012), grain is consumed in vast amounts.

Raising thousands of cattle on confining feedlots has ecological consequences. First, there is increased land use to grow the grain required. Also, all those animals collectively generate enormous piles of waste, which must be managed and which often end up polluting waterways. Much of the grain that cattle eat is from irrigated crops. For example, in 2012, corn production accounted for roughly 25 percent of total US-irrigated acreage harvested, while hay and other forage production made up 18 percent. In addition, most irrigated acreage is located in the American plains and western states - regions that experience frequent droughts and water scarcity, placing additional burdens on already stressed water supplies. All of this figures into the water footprint of conventional beef.

Pasture-raised cattle, by comparison, spend their entire life eating grass. They typically take 24 to 28 months to reach market weight, because it takes longer for them to gain weight. Because they rely on grass that is predominantly rain-fed, grass-fed cattle have a higher green water footprint, which isn't a problem unless there is a drought that impacts availability of grass. In addition, manure from grass-fed cattle production is typically used as land fertilizer and is part of regenerative agricultural practices in well-managed pasture operations.

The US and Global Water Footprint of Beef

Given that the average American eats around 181 pounds of meat annually, it is easy to see how meat consumption might account for so much of an American's water footprint. In fact, American meat consumption is nearly three times that of the global average. Worldwide consumption of meat and animal products makes up 27 percent of humanity's total water footprint. Of that total, 98 percent is due to the water required to produce animal feed, while water for drinking, cleaning and feed mixing constitutes only 1.1 percent, 0.8 percent and 0.03 percent, respectively.

How and Where Food Comes from Impacts a Person's Water Footprint

Diets made up of highly processed foods - like packaged snacks and ready-made meals - also use a lot of water. For example, ounce for ounce, potato chips have a higher water footprint than whole potatoes. After growing the potatoes (which uses the most water), it takes more water to clean the potatoes and the processing machinery, plus even more water for producing cooking oil for deep frying, producing fuel for delivery and packaging the product. This quantity of water - that incorporates growing, processing, cooking, packaging and transport - is known as "virtual water."

Where food is grown can also impact a person's water footprint. California, for example, produces more food than any other US state, supplying a large part of the country's milk, beef, produce and nuts. It is also one of the nation's driest states and recently experienced a drought of historic proportions. As a result, California's agricultural sector puts enormous strain on the water supplies of the entire southwest, mainly through its allotments from the Colorado River, which it shares with other states. A significant portion of that limited water supply is then "shipped" as virtual water when they export almonds or alfalfa (for animal feed) to other states or countries, like Japan and China. Likewise, when food is shipped from other states and countries, it taps into distant water supplies. As global trade increases the amount of food that is moved around the planet, these calculations become important indicators of the actual amount of water used to get these foods to peoples' plates.

Transporting food over long distances also requires large quantities of fuel, which pollutes the air, contributes to climate change and uses huge volumes of water. Producing gasoline and other transportation fuels requires water: about 3/4 gallon of water is needed to produce enough gasoline to drive one mile.

In short, agriculture has a significant impact on water resources; and while people's individual water footprints will never approach zero, the more meat, dairy and processed foods each of us consumes, the more water we use and the higher our water footprints. That is why it is important to understand how the various components of water footprints for a particular food item are calculated.

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The term "water footprint" is used to indicate the amount of fresh water that any given process or activity uses. Growing and processing crops and livestock consumes large quantities of water; therefore, the water footprint of food is high.

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The same day that 600 National Guard members deployed around Jackson, Miss., to distribute water to tens of thousands of people, one steady line of cars flowed instead through a quiet residential neighborhood, as they've been doing for months.

The Sykes Park Community Center got a large filter six months ago to purify water for local residents to pick up.

"We just don't do it periodically. We do it every single day," says Jason Page, a youth mentor with the group Strong Arms, who speaks as he directs traffic in and out of the parking lot. "The Jackson water has been messed up for a while now."

A week after more than 160,000 residents lost their water, it's still not clear when the city's primary water treatment plant, O.B. Curtis, will be back up. But even when that happens, people here say the larger crisis will not be over. Jackson's water has been unreliable and unsafe for decades. Many residents accuse the state government of neglecting the needs of a city that's 82% Black. And those tensions, along with Jackson's shrunken tax base, pose a challenge to any lasting solution.

The rituals of boiling water, and the luxury of a bath

Lifelong resident Halima Olufemi, 45, remembers her great-grandmother and grandmother boiling water. "So much so that we would buy extra jugs and they would always pour the water in," she says. "It was a way of life."

She's now an activist with the People's Advocacy Institute and has been helping distribute water in this emergency.

So has Danyelle Holmes, with the Mississippi Poor People's Campaign. Thirty years ago she moved here from Greenwood in the Mississippi Delta to go to college and was told not to drink the water.

"I've never drank tap water since I've been here in the city of Jackson," Holmes says. "Never."

The city's aging water lines can leak, leading to low pressure and contamination. There have also been broken water and sewage lines. And in 2016 the state's health department warned that it had found lead in the water supply.

Even before this crisis, Holmes always boiled her water. She does take showers, but her water is usually tinted brown, and she refuses to take a bath in that.

"Now, before my mom passed away three years ago, it did me good to just go home to take baths back in Greenwood," she says. "That was a luxury for me."

A city and state divided by race and politics

When you ask almost anyone here why the water's been this bad so long, the answer inevitably turns to politics and race. School desegregation led to white flight in the 1970s. That transformed Jackson into an overwhelmingly Black city and a largely poor one. The mayor is Black and a Democrat. The governor and most state lawmakers are white and Republican.

Danyelle Holmes says the water is a danger to residents because "those that are in power ... neglected to do what they had the power to do, and that is to invest in the infrastructure here in the city of Jackson."

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba says fixing the water system would cost more than a billion dollars. There's no way Jackson's shriveled tax base could pay for that. But when the city asks the state for money, it usually gets far less than requested, if any.

The governor blames water problems on the city's mismanagement. This year he signed the state's largest ever tax cut.

For activist Olufemi, it's all part of the country's fraught racial history, and how she says those in power have always treated the economically disadvantaged, especially people of color.

"I don't think that they care until it happens to them," she says. "Until it affects their homes, their children, their money, they don't pay attention."

Making infrastructure work can be a unifying force

Carlos Martín of the Brookings Institution says the impact of race and partisan politics on infrastructure is real, and Jackson residents are not alone. But ideally, making infrastructure work should unite people.

"In many ways, it's a miracle that we don't have more Jackson, Mississippis, and Flint, Michigans, in this country," he says. "And that's for the grace of God and infrastructure that ties most communities' infrastructures together."

He says on the whole around the country, infrastructure ties together communities that are Black and white, rich and poor, creating a shared interest in keeping the systems working properly.

But "when we don't see those same communities being served by the same physical infrastructure systems, we see more of these cases" like Jackson, he says.

Martín says Jackson and other minority, low-income cities lack the political clout to get the resources they need for long term planning and investment. And it's not clear this current crisis will lead to that either.

"Money fixes things at the last minute," he says. "We have, generally, a history of doing things like what we're seeing right now in Jackson, declaring an emergency once the damage has already occurred."

Tensions over blame amid calls for a long-term fix

At a recent press conference, when asked why Jackson has had unreliable water for decades, Gov. Tate Reeves was defensive.

"I know that you in the press want to play the blame game and you really want to focus on pitting different people against each other, and that's certainly your priority, that's fine," he said. "What we are focused on is the immediate health and welfare of Jackson residents."

It was the first press conference all week where the governor and mayor actually appeared together. Both Reeves and Mayor Lumumba repeatedly emphasized their "operational unity."

"When I have been asking for this help, when the state comes to me and says we're coming to help you, it doesn't benefit for us to try and take jabs at each other, to fight in that moment," Lumumba said. "What we have to take advantage of is this opportunity to realize how we create a better system for our residents."

But it wasn't long before another tit-for-tat spat between the two, raising questions about whether they can effectively work together even in a crisis that's gained national attention.

Jackson will get money from the recent federal infrastructure law - which, researcher Martín points out, most of the state's congressional delegation voted against. It's up to the state to decide how to parcel out those funds among municipalities.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have met in private to talk about new ideas for some kind of long-term fix. Some have called for addressing the crisis in a special session of the legislature, which is not due to meet again until January.

For now, though, thousands of people here will keep lining up for the water they need to cook, wash dishes and drink.

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Avoiding the tap water in Jackson, Miss., has been a way of life for decades

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The same day that 600 National Guard members deployed around Jackson, Miss., to distribute water to tens of thousands of people, one steady line of cars flowed instead through a quiet residential neighborhood, as they've been doing for months. The Sykes Park Community Center got a large filter six months ago to purify water for local residents to pick up.

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Dirty water, drying wells: Central Californians shoulder drought’s inequities

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Dry wells and contaminated drinking water mostly affect low-income communities of color. Experts say drought and climate change are making it worse.

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Africa is caught in a vortex of poverty, water and disease

The novel coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the hard-won years of progress against another pandemic - cholera, an acute diarrhoeal illness caused by Vibrio cholerae. The bacteria is shed through faeces and infects through contaminated water and food.

Since 1817, the infection has emerged from endemic areas in Asia in seven pandemic waves that have involved much of the world. The seventh and current cholera pandemic, which began in 1961, has lasted longer, spread further, and infected more people than any of its predecessors, and remains entrenched in sub-Saharan Africa where it causes intermittent outbreaks in communities already burdened with conflict, lack of infrastructure, poor health systems and malnutrition.

The illness is easily preventable by ensuring access to safe drinking water and sanitation and is curable through simple treatments like oral medicine, or in severe cases, intravenous rehydration. But as per the World Health Organization, 83 per cent of deaths in sub-Saharan Africa between 2000 and 2015 were due to cholera.

Though cases were on the wane since 2017, several countries including Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Niger, Somalia, Cameroon, Mozambique have reported outbreaks of cholera since the onset of COVID-19. In Nigeria, which faces one of the largest outbreaks, cholera had spread to 32 of its 36 states, sickened 90,000 people and caused more than 3,000 deaths by the end of 2021.

In Zambia, the Disease Intelligence Agency, the water utility companies and the local authorities, heightened active surveillance-reporting of diarrhoea cases every morning just like for COVID-19, after they found faecal contamination of water in seven townships of capital city Lusaka in October 2021.

To contain the spread, authorities in Nigeria have supplied tanker water in high-risk areas, while those in Lusaka have secured bottles of liquid chlorine to disinfect water.

Some analysts blame COVID-19 for the cholera outbreaks. As priority shifted towards COVID-19 containment, it resulted in a lapse in contact-tracing and the diagnosis and treatment of cholera patients in high-risk areas, they say.

Bioye Ogunjobi, a UNICEF official in Nigeria, however, blames it on the governments' lackadaisical attitude towards ensuring access to safe water and sanitation:

The countries have not understood the concept of water quality. It does not involve chlorinating water at one point. Combating water-borne diseases rather requires ensuring that water is safe in the entire value chain - from the source till consumption.

Quality takes a hit
But this is a difficult proposition for most living in rural and peri-urban areas or informal settlements of Africa. Williams Ngwakwe, who coordinates a non-profit Golden Change that works on water and sanitation projects in northern Nigeria, says a community called Chida in Kwali area council of Federal Capital Territory (FCT) grows a lot of cassava, but rarely cleans it with water before eating it.

Such is the water shortage that they just peel it, grind it and consume. Hand hygiene before meals is also poor. One can imagine what a girl child goes through in such places during menstrual period and the kind of disease outbreaks such personal and environmental hygiene can result in, Ngwakwe adds.

In South Africa's Mthatha city, a majority of well-to-do population also struggles daily to get water and resorts to using water from drains for bathing and washing.

The Joint Monitoring Program the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, which is responsible for global monitoring of the progress on sustainable development goals, in its latest report states that the rural poor are more prone to contaminated water. They usually depend on shallow borewells that have been found to be bacteriologically contaminated due to lack of proper sanitation facilities.

This lack of access leads to diseases like cholera, dysentery and typhoid. Poor sanitation facilities also lead to stagnated waters which lead to breeding of mosquitoes and malaria outbreaks in sub-Saharan Africa.

A 2020 study by Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) on groundwater resources of Uganda also finds that inadequate sanitation facilities are a major cause for the deterioration of the quality of the country's water bodies.

In the Kingdom of Eswatini, Ndumiso Cyprian Magagula, an environmental inspector for waste management at Eswatini Environment Authority, admits that faulty sanitation systems end up contaminating the surface and groundwater bodies.

"A system should be developed which ensures that the potable water shall be provided only to those households which have properly designed containment systems and ensure timely emptying of systems," Magagula says.
No space for sanitation
Although Africa is the least urbanised continent, the sub-Saharan region, which has 46 countries and several developing cities, has seen rapid urbanisation. It has consequently spurred challenges in terms of basic services and sanitation.

Magagula points out that in commercial hubs of Eswatini that receive a large number of migrant workers, people build cheap housing without any sanitary services. Over the years, these cramped up spaces have left little to provide facilities to manage faecal sludge.

Dumping of solid waste, household waste water and effluent from industries end up in water bodies. The part of population that depend on borewells also face water quality issues due to faulty sewage and onsite systems.

Magagula says the only possible solution to this is some people are relocated and space is made to develop proper facilities along with developing proper solid waste and waste water management systems. For now the Eswatini government is training the police to monitor any violation activities and educating communities.

In Nigeria, says Ngwakwe, the government has introduced a national action plan to stop defecation in the open. To begin with, the clean Nigeria campaign was launched in the north-western part of the country, where the aim was to declare 100 local government areas open-defecation-free (ODF) by the end of 2021.

However, scarcity of water in addition to the activities of bandits in the Northwestern part has slowed the campaign work and less than 30 areas could be declared ODF.

"Now we hear that some people in those communities are moving to internally displaced persons' camps. So when that eventually happened we were sure that people will continue defecating outside again as they may not even have access to the basic amenities, including water and sanitation," says Magagula.

Some 600,000 people in Cabo Delgado in Mozambique's Northern Province have been facing shortage of safe water, sanitation and health following a massive migration due to frequent cyclones and armed attacks. Pandemic has added to the woes. A WHO report in March 2021 states cholera cases had surpassed the 2020 levels despite reduction in testing capacity owing to destruction of health facilities.
Unfit groundwater
While a majority of the economy is dependent on groundwater in sub-Saharan Africa, little attention is paid to its quality. Due to geological formations several African countries have higher concentrations of fluorides, arsenic and chlorides.

These also make groundwater unfit for drinking without treatment. A 2020 study by CSE has found high concentration of iron, magnesium and chlorides due to natural mineralisation in groundwater of Uganda. Fluoride levels were also higher than the drinking water guidelines by WHO due to volcanic deposits.

These results in various diseases such as fluorosis, while iron results in unpleasant odour and taste and manganese damages the plumbing fixtures and laundries.

In Tanzania, the CSE study had identified that the groundwater was polluted with nitrates and sulphates. Mining of these resources and hazardous dumping of waste in the open, results in the waste ending up in waterbodies and this increases their salts and mineral contents, affecting their pH value (acidity or basicity).

However, the need for the same is hardly addressed barring a few research studies. Problems such as groundwater contaminated with nitrate and fluoride should also be catered to on a war footing.

The community should either have a community-level water supply systems which treat the groundwater before supply to households or their should be mechanisms where the groundwater supplies are treated before supply to households, which again can be a costly affair for the rural households.

Water resources are unevenly distributed in Africa, points out Puneet Srivastava, senior international expert on water who currently works with WaterAid UK. Water is abundant in the Congo basin while there is physical water scarcity in southern Africa and economic water scarcity elsewhere.

Weak rainwater harvesting, limited renewal of groundwater and little conservation exacerbates water scarcity. This scarcity, coupled with poor sanitation practices, has resulted in an abundance of illnesses, diseases and deaths.

Water scarcity is responsible for a variety of waterborne tropical diseases, such as typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery and diarrheal illnesses in Africa. Where people have access to water, activities such as mining, farming and deforestation, combined with weak infrastructure, lack of improved public policy and public accountability and weak regulation have significantly contributed to the pollution of those sources.

To solve some of these challenges, Srivastava highlights the need for involvement of all people in water related democratic dialogues at all the levels to identify some of these challenges and their solutions by the local stakeholders, a concept that he has successfully applied in shape of Jal Choupal or Water Democratic Platforms in northern Indian states.

Democratising water helps in bringing all stakeholders such as governments, local governments, communities, private sector and non-profits towards a common understanding of challenges to water quality and working on locally relevant solutions together and in convergence.
Reporting by Rivonala Razafison, Bennett Oghifo, Mekonnen Teshome , Maina Waruru, Engela Duvenage, Kiran Pandey, Swati Bhatia, Nivit Kumar Yadav
This was first published in Down To Earth 's print edition (dated 16-31 January, 2022)

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Water, Africa's Gold: One crisis too many

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Africa is caught in a vortex of poverty, water and disease The novel coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the hard-won years of progress against another pandemic - cholera, an acute diarrhoeal illness caused by Vibrio cholerae. The bacteria is shed through faeces and infects through contaminated water and food.

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Microplastics in Blood Spotlight Health Emergency from Plastic Pollution

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Plastic pollution is growing rapidly across Earth's ecosystems and its threat to humanity and wildlife is too. Outcomes for health and the environment will be dire unless we tackle it, says a United Nations (UN) report. But the discovery of microplastics in human blood means urgent action is needed.

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Coastal urban centers around the world are urgently looking for new, sustainable water sources as their local supplies become less reliable. In the U.S., the issue is especially pressing in California, which is coping with a record-setting, multidecadal drought.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently released a US$8 billion plan for coping with a shrinking water supply. Along with water conservation, storage and recycling, it includes desalination of more seawater.

Ocean desalination, which turns salt water into fresh, clean water, has an intuitive appeal as a water supply strategy for coastal cities. The raw supply of salt water is virtually unlimited and reliable.

Ocean desalination is already a major water source in Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Cities in the Middle East, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, the U.S. Southwest and Australia also rely on it. There are more than 20 ocean desalination plants operating in California, plus a few in Florida. Many more plants across the U.S. remove salt from brackish (salty) water sources such as groundwater inland, especially in Texas.

Nonetheless, current evidence shows that even in coastal cities, ocean desalination may not be the best or even among the best options to address water shortfalls. Here are the main issues that communities evaluating this option should consider.

Killing aquatic life

Scalable technologies for removing salt from water have improved steadily over the past few decades. This is especially true for treating brackish groundwater, which is less salty than seawater.

But desalination still can have major environmental impacts. Fish can be killed when they are trapped against screens that protect desalination plants' intake valves, and small organisms such as bacteria and plankton can be sucked into the plants and killed when they pass through the treatment system. In May 2022, the California Coastal Commission unanimously rejected a proposed $1.4 billion ocean desalination plant in Huntington Beach, partly because of its potential effect on sea life.

Desalination plants discharge brine and wastewater, which can also kill nearby aquatic life if the process is not done properly. And generating the large quantity of energy that the plants consume has its own environmental impacts until it can be done carbon-free, which is still years off in most cases.

Unaffordable water from costly plants

Cost is another major hurdle. In most areas, the cost of ocean desalination is projected to remain considerably higher than the cost of feasible alternatives such as conservation for the next several decades - the timeline that utilities use when planning new investments. My colleagues and I found this in our research comparing water supply alternatives for Huntington Beach, even though we made favorable assumptions about ocean desalination costs.

Cost breakthroughs on major, market-ready technology in the near to medium term are unlikely. And desalination costs may increase in response to rising energy prices, which represent up to half the cost of removing salt from water.

Moreover, capital cost projections for desalination plants often greatly understate these facilities' true cost. For example, the final cost ($1 billion) to build the ocean desalination plant in Carlsbad, California, which opened in late 2015, was four times higher than the original projection.

Our center has also explored whether piping in desalinated ocean water is a viable option for small, typically rural areas with public water systems or private wells that have run dry or are close to giving out. In diverse parts of California where this has happened, such as Porterville in the Central Valley and Montecito along the coast, the state is paying over $1 per gallon to truck in small supplies of bottled and vended water. That's much higher than even the most expensive desalinated seawater.

In these cases, we have found that the relative economics and even the environmental impact may pencil out, but the politics and management of new pipelines do not. This is because water supply is typically governed locally, and many local areas beyond those benefiting would need to agree to a new pipeline from the coast.

More broadly, we find that proponents of these projects do not proactively pursue strategies that would make water access more equitable, such as designing utility rate structures that shield low-income households from higher costs, providing financial aid to small communities or consolidating water systems.

Better options: Conservation, reuse, storage and trading

In most places, several other supply options can and should be pursued in tandem before ocean desalination. All of these steps will provide more water at a lower cost.

The first and relatively cheapest way to address water shortages is by using less. Finding ways to get people to use less water could reduce existing demand by 30%-50% in many urban areas that have already begun conservation efforts.

Second, recycling or reusing treated wastewater is often less expensive than desalination. Technology and regulations in this area are advancing, and this is already making large investments in recycling possible in many arid regions.

Third, storage capacity for enhanced capture of stormwater - even in areas where it rains infrequently - can be doubled or quadrupled in regions like Los Angeles and parts of Australia, at one-third to one-half of the cost per unit of desalinated water.

Even cleaning up polluted local groundwater supplies and purchasing water from nearby agricultural users, although these are costly and politically difficult strategies, may be prudent to consider before ocean desalination.

The feasibility of desalination as a local supply option will hopefully change by midcentury as water scarcity problems mount because of climate change. For the medium term, however, ocean desalination is still likely to play a small role if it figures at all in holistic water strategies for coastal urban areas.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Gregory Pierce, University of California, Los Angeles. The Conversation has a variety of fascinating free newsletters. Gregory Pierce received funding from the Resources Legacy Fund for one of the reports cited in this piece.

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Desalinating seawater sounds easy, but there are cheaper and more sustainable ways to meet people's water needs

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The Carlsbad Desalination Plant in Southern California is the largest such plant in the Western Hemisphere, providing 50 million gallons of desalinated seawater per day.​ Reed Kaestner via Getty ImagesCoastal urban centers around the world are urgently looking for new, sustainable water sources as their local supplies become less reliable.

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Las Vegas isn’t betting on Mother Nature to solve its water problems. Here’s how it intends to win | CNN

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Las Vegas has implemented bans on swimming pools, grass and irrigation to save its vanishing water.

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In places, the Loire can now be crossed on foot; France's longest river has never flowed so slowly. The Rhine is fast becoming impassable to barge traffic. In Italy, the Po is 2 metres lower than normal, crippling crops. Serbia is dredging the Danube.

Across Europe, drought is reducing once-mighty rivers to trickles, with potentially dramatic consequences for industry, freight, energy and food production - just as supply shortages and price rises due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine bite.

Driven by climate breakdown, an unusually dry winter and spring followed by record-breaking summer temperatures and repeated heatwaves have left Europe's essential waterways under-replenished and, increasingly, overheated.

With no significant rainfall recorded for almost two months across western, central and southern Europe and none forecast in the near future, meteorologists say the drought could become the continent's worst in more than 500 years.

"We haven't analysed fully this year's event because it is still ongoing," said Andrea Toreti of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. "There were no other events in the past 500 [years] similar to the drought of 2018. But this year, I think, is worse."

He said there was "a very high risk of dry conditions" continuing over the next three months, adding that without effective mitigation drought intensity and frequency would "increase dramatically over Europe, both in the north and in the south".

Germany's Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG) said the level of the Rhine, whose waters are used for freight transport, irrigation, manufacturing, power generation and drinking, will continue dropping until at least the beginning of next week.

On Friday the water at the critical Kaub marker 50km downstream from Mainz - which measures navigability, rather than the water depth - fell below 40cm, the level at which many shipping firms consider it is no longer economical for barges to operate. It could fall to nearer 30cm over the next few days, the BfG has said.

Many barges, which carry coal for power plants and vital raw materials for industrial giants such as steelmaker Thyssen and chemical giant BASF, are already operating at about 25% capacity to reduce their draft, raising shipping costs up to fivefold.

A vital part of northwest Europe's economy for centuries, the 760 miles (1,233km) of the Rhine flow from Switzerland through Germany's industrial heartland before reaching the North Sea at the megaport of Rotterdam.

A total halt in Rhine barge traffic would hit Germany's - and Europe's - economy hard: experts have calculated that a six-month suspension in 2018 cost around €5bn (£4.2bn), with low water levels forecast to cost Germany 0.2 points of economic growth this year.

While the EU has said boosting waterborne freight by 25% is one of the bloc's green transition priorities, Germany is now working to divert it to rail and road - although between 40 and 100 trucks are needed to replace a standard barge load.

France's rivers might not be such key freight arteries, but they do serve to cool the nuclear plants that produce 70% of the country's electricity. As prices hit all-time highs, power giant EDF has been forced to reduce output because of the drought.

Strict rules regulate how far nuclear plants can raise river temperatures when they discharge cooling water - and if record low water levels and high air temperatures mean the river is already overheated, they have no option but to cut output. With Europe's looming energy crisis mounting and the Garonne, Rhône and Loire rivers already too warm to allow cooling water to be discharged, the French nuclear regulator last week allowed five plants to temporarily break the rules.

In Italy, the flow of the parched Po, Italy's longest river, has fallen to one-tenth of its usual rate, and water levels are 2 metres below normal. With no sustained rainfall in the region since November, corn and risotto rice production have been hard hit.

The Po valley accounts for between 30% and 40% of Italy's agricultural production, but rice growers in particular have warned that up to 60% of their crop may be lost as paddy fields dry out and are spoiled by seawater sucked in by the low river level.

In the protected wetlands of the river's delta, near Venice, its high temperature and sluggish flow have reduced the water's oxygen content to the extent that an estimated 30% of clams growing in the lagoon have already been killed off.

Low river levels and high water temperatures can prove fatal to many species. In Bavaria, the Danube reached 25C last week and could hit 26.5C by mid-month, meaning its oxygen content would fall below six parts per million - fatal for trout.

Freight on the 2,850km of the Danube has also been heavily disrupted, prompting authorities in Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria to start dredging deeper channels while barges carrying mainly fuel for the power generators wait to advance.

Even Norway, which relies on hydropower for about 90% of its electricity generation, has said the unusually low levels of its reservoirs may ultimately oblige it to limit power exports.

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Europe's rivers run dry as scientists warn drought could be worst in 500 years

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In places, the Loire can now be crossed on foot; France's longest river has never flowed so slowly. The Rhine is fast becoming impassable to barge traffic. In Italy, the Po is 2 metres lower than normal, crippling crops. Serbia is dredging the Danube.

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The corn harvest, used mainly for animal feed, is expected to be 18.5% lower this year compared with 2021, the agriculture ministry said. The main corn-growing areas are Alsace in the east and western regions, and the harvest is already under way.

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France drought: Parched towns left short of drinking water

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The corn harvest, used mainly for animal feed, is expected to be 18.5% lower this year compared with 2021, the agriculture ministry said. The main corn-growing areas are Alsace in the east and western regions, and the harvest is already under way.

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In the parched Colorado River basin, water managers are turning over every stone looking for ways to keep the taps flowing. Now, they're finding more water in some unusual places - shower drains and toilet flushes.

At a sprawling sewage treatment plant in Carson, California, the occasional breeze delivers a pungent whiff of a reminder of how used water becomes "reused." Here, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is planting the seeds for a massive new facility, where a multi-billion-dollar installation could help recycle wastewater and keep drinking supply flowing for the agency's 19 million customers.

As climate change makes it increasingly clear that natural forces won't deliver enough water to turn around a 23-year drought, water managers are looking for ways to stretch out the supply that's already in the system.

"It's super exciting," said Rupam Soni, a community relations manager for Metropolitan. "It is going to make a substantial change. It's going to provide a new supply."

Soni is leading a tour through a demonstration site of the agency's water recycling technology. A tight-packed network of pipes and pumps - many equipped with high-tech sensors - whirs in the background. She holds up a flask of the final product.

"This water is purified water," Soni said. "It's near distilled in quality. It's so pure that we would have to add minerals back into it. And it's really important for the future of our water supply, just as the Colorado River is too."

This demonstration site is meant to prove that large-scale water recycling will work at the Carson location, and help convince policymakers and the public that the project is worth supporting. It'll be a costly and drawn-out build, and historically, some have expressed queasiness at the prospect of drinking treated wastewater.
Expensive, but "priceless in the future"
The proposed facility is projected to cost $3.4 billion to build. Once completed, it would cost $129 million to operate each year. Construction timelines project that it could go online in 2032.

Currently, the treatment plant next door cleans more than 200 million gallons of water each day, enough to fill six Costco warehouses. That water is not clean enough to drink, but is treated enough to be safely pumped into the ocean, about two miles off the coast. The new facility from Metropolitan aims to redirect up to 150 million gallons back into the municipal supply in and around Los Angeles.

Felicia Marcus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Water in the West Program, is candid about water recycling's hefty price tag, but said the technology is one of the best options for Southern California and water-short cities around the region going forward.

"There's not a lot of con other than it's expensive," she said. "But it's a smart investment. My view is that it'll be priceless in the future."

Marcus chaired the California State Water Resources Control Board and served as president of the board of Public Works for the City of Los Angeles. Technological advances and growing public acceptance - including younger generations' willingness to get past the "yuck factor" - have made it a "cheaper, smarter and faster" solution than methods such as desalination, she said.

As policymakers across the arid West scramble to agree on new ways to divvy up the region's shrinking water supply, the outlook for water to come back naturally keeps getting bleaker. Climate change is making the Colorado River watershed hotter and drier. That reality, Marcus said, will change the calculus for the future of water use, and raise the costs to deliver clean water to cities.

"The reality we're in now won't exist under climate change," she said. "So we have to look at the economic cost of not having that water, and having to do massive 30, 40, 50% recycling on the social and economic fabric of major metropolitan areas."

The majority of the roughly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River live in major metropolitan areas. Agriculture, however, accounts for the bulk of water use. Farmers and ranchers use nearly 80% of the river's supply. For that reason, agricultural regions are often in discussions about water cutbacks. Some states are considering programs that would pay farmers to pause growing, freeing up that water for cities and suburbs.

Marcus, drawing on an apocryphal quote from a famous depression-era bank robber, said those programs will work best in tandem with conservation in cities.

"Willie Sutton, when asked why he robbed banks, said that it's because that's where the money is," Marcus said. "And agriculture, that's where the water is. But in my view, we should lose the lawns first, do our recycling, et cetera, and then work with agriculture to make a transition that doesn't throw our food system or the small communities in disarray."
Is the water safe?
As cities weigh the merits of an expensive new treatment process, experts have made at least one thing clear - it's safe.

David Jassby is an associate professor of civil environmental engineering at UCLA. He explained that treated wastewater already flows through streams and rivers across the country, and pointed to major utilities' track record of very few water-borne disease outbreaks as a testament to the capacity of treatment technology.

"The level of treatment that wastewater reuse entities use to recycle wastewater is far higher than what we apply to a river or groundwater," Jassby said. "It's orders of magnitude more intense and extensive."

Jassby heralded a water reuse program in Orange County, California as an example of the technology's potential. The county's Groundwater Replenishment System is the world's largest wastewater recycling facility, churning out 100 million gallons of drinkable water each day with expansion plans that could increase that total by 30 million.
Investment across state lines
Other water agencies in the Southwest are signaling their support for Metropolitan's bet on water reuse technology. If it's greenlit, a big chunk of funding for the Carson facility would come from outside of southern California, from water agencies whose customers will never even use it. The Southern Nevada Water Authority, the Central Arizona Project, and the Arizona Department of Water resources have all pledged to help fund the reuse project.

Once that new recycling setup is online, southern California will have more water in its own system, and will not need to draw as much from Colorado River reservoirs such as Lake Mead. The water left in the reservoirs will be made available to the partner agencies in Nevada and Arizona.

"If we're able to finalize the agreement and go forward," said David Johnson, deputy general manager of operations for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, "Then we would not have to build any of that transportation infrastructure to be able to get water from one location to another. So it just makes a lot of sense to us."

Johnson's agency is ready to contribute up to $750 million to secure that additional supply from Lake Mead. The deal represents a somewhat rare example of cross-state collaboration in the Colorado River basin. Water managers often preach the need for collaboration, asserting that collective solutions will be the only way out of the region's collective problem. But recently, opportunities to work together have found them unwilling to sacrifice their own water supplies, even under the threat of federal intervention.

While coming together for a water reuse program doesn't require the same level of cross-basin compromise as other discussions of sweeping water cutbacks, it still represents a collaborative step forward.

"This specific project will be somewhat of a trailblazer in terms of the exchange mechanisms that'll need to be put in place to actually accomplish it," said Patrick Dent, assistant general manager of water policy at the Central Arizona Project.

Dent's agency needs innovative solutions to keep water flowing in central Arizona. It pipes Colorado River water more than 300 miles across the desert, and has been the subject of federally mandated cutbacks that were issued in response to worsening drought. The area's population has boomed, and even forward-thinking plans to stash excess water and soften the drought's blow may not be enough to maintain the region's supply in the long term.

Arizona governor Doug Ducey generated headlines in January when he announced a substantial investment in desalination technology, but a proposed deal to purify seawater in Mexico and trade it for some of that country's Colorado River water has drawn skepticism from experts. The Central Arizona Project's willingness to fund an exchange for recycled water seems to signal that it may be a more feasible near-term solution for Arizona's water woes.

"The costs, while still significant for generating an acre-foot of recycled water, are less than desal generally because of the lower salt content," Dent said. "So I see a cost advantage and a water supply advantage."

Water in the Western U.S. is typically measured by the acre-foot, the amount of water needed to fill one acre of land to a height of one foot. One acre-foot generally provides enough water for one to two households for a year.

The federal government is also providing financial support for water reuse projects. President Joe Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law contains roughly $310 million for water recycling development nationwide, including 20 facilities in California alone.

Realistically, water reuse will not be the silver bullet in any part of the basin. While it can add to the supply, academics and water managers are generally quick to caution that no single innovation or policy will solve the Colorado River's sweeping drought crisis.

"We need to build a resilient system," said Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. "That takes investments in recycled water, investments in stormwater capture, investments in storage, investments in the pipeline to move water around, to balance the system. To me, this is the time to do it."
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.

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As the Colorado River shrinks, water managers see promise in recycling sewage

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In the parched Colorado River basin, water managers are turning over every stone looking for ways to keep the taps flowing. Now, they're finding more water in some unusual places - shower drains and toilet flushes. At a sprawling sewage treatment plant in Carson, California, the occasional breeze delivers a pungent whiff of a reminder of how used water becomes "reused."

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Your Laundry Sheds Harmful Microfibers. Here’s What You Can Do About It.

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Synthetic fabrics shed millions of tons of microplastics into oceans each year, largely through laundry wastewater. Here are ways to reduce the pollution.

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UCSB inventor is an undergraduate finalist in collegiate competition

KENNETH SONG/NEWS-PRESS PHOTOS
Visala Tallavarjula, an environmental studies major at UCSB, has developed an irrigation system that boosts water conservation and efficiency.

Visala Tallavarjula's irrigation innovations have impressed the judges.

The UCSB senior, who developed a way to boost both water conservation and efficiency, is an undergraduate finalist in the Collegiate Inventors Competition.

The environmental studies major's project is an irrigation system that would increase efficiency while conserving water. She has been researching this project for about seven years, beginning her research the summer before she started high school.

"My project is an irrigation improvement project with three innovations in one," Ms. Tallavarjula told the News-Press.

"The first innovation is a topsoil bed made of perlite-amended mixture," she said. "When you put it above the root zone of the plants and irrigate below the surface, it saves up to 30% of water used in the irrigation.

Visala Tallavarjula designed an irrigation system that mimics subsurface irrigation, where water is brought to the root zone of plants and doesn't evaporate or percolate.

"The second innovation is an insert - a cylindrical plastic pipe fitted to the emitter on a drip tube used to irrigate plants," Ms. Tallavarjula explained. "The insert can be connected to the emitter and brings water from the emitter to the root zone of the plant. Since it passes by the topsoil layer, it allows for the water to stay at the root zone and not go past the top layer.

"There is no need for an irrigation system below the topsoil bed," she said.

"The third invitation is PCL (percolation control layer): soil layer amended with 33% coarse grain charcoal, which helps prevent much percolation (water moving downwards due to gravity)," Ms. Tallavarjula said. "Percolation goes into the groundwater system, which should be prevented if we want to extract water from the groundwater system.

"These three innovations conserve about 50% of water used in irrigation and show a 50% increase in crop fields using this method as well as improved root plant health," Ms.Tallavarajula told the News-Press.

"The reason why I have three innovations is I invented each of them separately for the reason that a lot of farmers in developing countries or developing regions are uneasy about changing irrigation and farming systems," she said. "Most agriculture is produced in these regions by these farmers.

"We must go into these regions with an open mind and gradual change," Ms. Tallavarajula said. "These innovations used alongside gravity-fed drip irrigation are not much of a cost difference or differentiation from current irrigation."

Experts predict that over the next 25 years, global food demand will increase by 70%, leading to more water usage.

Ms. Tallavarajula's system is designed to efficiently use water. Her project mimics subsurface irrigation, where water is brought to the root zone of plants and doesn't evaporate or percolate.

Ms. Tallavarajula explained what inspired her irrigation project.

" I was traveling through the Central Valley with my family prior to high school and saw a lot of sprinkler systems," she said, referring to the waste of water. "Farms are not conserving water on such a large scale that it contributes to the drought, yet no one seems to be addressing it.

"My first innovation was the topsoil layer," Ms. Tallavarajula said. "I used research to create my own design of things less expensive and adaptable to farmers who are not high-tech or do not want to change current technology."

Ms. Tallavarajula addressed how her invention benefits agriculture and irrigation. "When there is arable land we can stop the spread of desertification. That's really exciting. The population is growing and we need to produce more food.

"My project saves a lot of water," Ms. Tallavarajula said. "A lot of countries charge for the use of water. If there were farmers being charged, this is very beneficial for them."

She also noted that plants irrigated with her system are healthier.

Ms. Tallavarajula said that if her project wins the Collegiate Inventors Competition, "people all over the world, particularly farmers who don't have as many resources available to them to irrigate their crops, would have the opportunity to receive help through my project. A patent would allow me to bring my project to other people without it being stolen.

"Receiving the prize would allow me to jumpstart a project and create a tiered company," she said. "However, I think everyone has a project worthy of winning."

Ms. Tallavarajula and the other finalists will present their inventions on Oct. 12 to final-round judges composed of inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame and officials from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The competition will take place at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office headquarters in Alexandria, Va.

The winning teams will be announced on Oct. 13.

"There is a crucial need for us all to invest in the next generation of world-changing inventors," Kathi Vidal, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO, said in a news release. "The USPTO is honored to recognize the amazing work of the finalists in the Collegiate Inventors Competition, where the future of American innovation is on display."

Ms. Tallavarajula said she's excited about being one of the five undergraduate finalists, as well as the only team with just one member.

She added she's looking forward to meeting the USPTO officials. "It will be fun to pick their brains on applying for patents."

email: kzehnder@newspress.com

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Finding a better way to irrigate - Santa Barbara News-Press

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Visala Tallavarjula's irrigation innovations have impressed the judges. The UCSB senior, who developed a way to boost both water conservation and efficiency, is an undergraduate finalist in the Collegiate Inventors Competition. The environmental studies major's project is an irrigation system that would increase efficiency while conserving water.

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Editor's Note: Sign up for CNN's Life, But Greener newsletter. Our seven-part guide helps you minimize your personal role in the climate crisis - and reduce your eco-anxiety.

Marco Springmann is from Germany's Ruhr region, a largely working-class area he likens to the American Rust Belt. His father made a living building generators for coal-fired power plants.

"It's a very practical, proletarian area that I'm from, and I guess, the diet that I grew up in was very much from the region," the University of Oxford researcher said. "Lots of sausages."

Germany happens to be one of the world's top consumers of sausages and produces more than 1.5 metric tons of it each year.

But Springmann's tastes started to change when he moved to the US for graduate school... or rather, his thinking started to change.

Springmann was studying to become a physicist when he began learning about the health concerns associated with meat. So, he began removing it from his diet. As he continued studying, he shifted to a completely plant-based diet. He also switched his area of research from physics to atmospheric science and climate change. At the crossroads of his two major interests - health and climate - Springmann's research was showing how his plant-based diet lowered his carbon footprint.

"My initial thought was, 'If I know it's healthier and it's more environmentally sustainable (to not eat animal products), why wouldn't I do that?'"

With his meat-eating days over, he dug deeper into the correlation of diet and environment - specifically, how eating less animal-based products could help slow the climate crisis. It's a topic he said did not get a lot of attention 15 to 20 years ago.

"At that time, most of the climate change research was really sort of on the production side - power plants and how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The link between climate change, greenhouse gas emissions and the food system was really in the baby stage."

Appetite for destruction

Springmann is now a Senior Researcher in Environment and Health at the University of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute. Based now in the UK, his research has been shared around the world about the "very little chance of avoiding dangerous levels of climate change" without a shift in eating habits toward more plant-based diets.

According to Springmann, if everyone adopted a plant-based diet by 2050 it would save about "eight gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions."

"The savings of 8 [gigatons] would be the second biggest emitter. That's after China's emissions, but a quarter more than the US's and double those of Europe."

One reason for this is that "beef is more than 100-times as emissions-intensive as legumes," according to Springmann in a 2019 CNN article.

Beside less greenhouse gas emissions, lower meat production would save energy, water and land use around the world. And eating less meat lowers risks of heart disease, obesity and other health problems.

But Springmann is not out to "steak shame" people, insisting he would never tell anyone to become vegan. "I include a plant-based scenario often in my research, but only amongst a plethora of other scenarios like flexitarian, pescatarian, vegetarian scenarios and so on."

So there's no need to get your stomach in a knot worrying about making big sweeping changes to your diet; you don't need to give up meat completely.

"Our main scenario was this flexitarian scenario," Springmann says. "That included red meat not more than one serving a week, poultry not more than two servings a week, fish not more than two servings per week and dairy not more than one serving a day. So, if you count it all up, that diet is like vegetarian or vegan up to two days a week."

Food for thought

Springmann's own parents, still living in Germany, have gradually started cooking more plant-based meals, opening up their plates to new foods and experimenting in the kitchen.

"For Christmas last year, I tried to make a vegan Beef Wellington which was good fun," he said. "Everybody liked it, which was nice."

He's also beginning to notice an overall change in attitude and diets throughout his homeland.

According to a 2020 report from the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, 55% of those surveyed consider themselves flexitarian. He believes these dietary shifts are happening because many Germans are concerned about the climate crisis and are open to discussing what effects their own behaviors have on it.

"The discussion has really moved a lot and it has helped to talk about the scientific underpinnings of diets and climate change. Whereas in the States, it has become much more polarized."

Many Americans might have a hard time putting down their hamburgers for the climate crisis, but at the rate the world's population is growing, meat production won't be able to keep up. A 2019 World Resources Institute report found that "Americans will need to cut their average consumption of beef by about 40% " in order to keep with the food supply. But the good news is that it is now easier than ever to find meat alternatives and plant-based food almost anywhere you go.

Springmann hopes that the growing concerns around the climate crisis could one day unite us all in a global food movement because everyone will need to have a seat at the table in order to make a change.

"The many challenges we are facing, and will continue to face, can only be addressed if we manage to work together across divides, and I'm hopeful that we can do this."

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He grew up in a sausage-loving country, but now advocates for plant-based diets to fight the climate crisis | CNN

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Editor's Note: Sign up for CNN's Life, But Greener newsletter. Our seven-part guide helps you minimize your personal role in the climate crisis - and reduce your eco-anxiety. Marco Springmann is from Germany's Ruhr region, a largely working-class area he likens to the American Rust Belt.

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The term equity refers to just and fair inclusion-a condition in which everyone has an opportunity to participate and prosper. At the US Water Alliance we believe that water equity occurs when all communities:

Have access to safe, clean, affordable drinking water and wastewater services;

Share in the economic, social, and environmental benefits of water systems; and

Are resilient in the face of floods, drought, and other climate risks.

Below we describe these three pillars of water equity, and for a more in-depth discussion read our recently released national briefing paper here.

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The term equity refers to just and fair inclusion-a condition in which everyone has an opportunity to participate and prosper. At the US Water Alliance we believe that water equity occurs when all communities: Have access to safe, clean, affordable drinking water and wastewater services; Share in the economic, social, and environmental benefits of water systems; and Are resilient in the face of floods, drought, and other climate risks.

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The Great Bubble Barrier is just that - a wall of bubbles. It gurgles across the water in a diagonal screen, pushing plastic to one side while allowing fish and other wildlife to pass unharmed.

The technology, created by a Dutch firm and already being used in Amsterdam, will be trialled in the Porto region of Portugalas part of the EU-supported Maelstrom (marine litter sustainable removal and management) project.

It is the latest in a series of new technologies designed to find sustainable ways to remove and treat river debris before it reaches the sea.

Plastic can be spread by natural disasters, such as a tsunami, which can push invasive species and debris halfway across the world. But rivers carry a much more regular supply of plastic to the oceans. Research in 2017 found that 10 river systems transport 90% of all the plastic that ends up in the world's oceans (two in Africa - the Nile and Niger - with the other eight in Asia: the Ganges, Indus, Yellow, Yangtze, Haihe, Pearl, Mekong and Amur).

A man paddles along the Citarum River in West Java, Indonesia, one of the word's most polluted rivers. In 2018, it was estimated that 20,000 tonnes of rubbish and 350,000 tonnes of wastewater were dumped in it every day. Photograph: Andrea Carrubba/The Guardian

Molly Morse, a scientist at UC Santa Barbara's Benioff Ocean Initiative and lead on its global Clean Currents Coalition, says: "In some cases, communities don't have access to proper waste pickup services and must turn to what might seem to be the only alternative: dump the trash directly in the river to be carried away.

"In other cases, plastic litter on land is moved by rain or wind into a river, where [...] the plastic may make its way to the ocean."

An estimated 0.8m to 2.7m tonnes of plastic are carried by rivers to the ocean each year. That is the equivalent of 66,000 to 225,000 doubledecker buses.

The most successful solutions have been simpler technologies, such as booms, barriers and traps

Molly Morse, Benioff Ocean Initiative

Without barriers, river currents carry plastic directly to the sea, where it becomes far trickier to tackle: plastic often floats for vast distances, can host invasive species and becomes part of the wider plastisphere, such as the concentration of seaborne waste in the Great Pacific garbage patch.

That is why some scientists are calling for greater efforts to stop plastic going into rivers in the first place. A 2020 study found that a "significant reduction" of plastic in the ocean could be achieved only by stopping it reaching the sea, or through a combination of river barriers and other clean-up devices.

Cue inventors, who have developed an array of river barriers and collection devices to catch and remove riverine plastic - from simple nets and booms to conveyor belts and robots.

Mr Trash Wheel, known officially as the Inner Harbor Water Wheel, is a conveyor-belt system powered by currents and solar energy, launched in 2014 in the US city of Baltimore. Long booms with submerged skirts funnel waste into a central hub, where autonomous rakes scoop it on to a conveyor belt that deposits it on a barge, with more than 17 tonnes collected in a day.

Once full, the barge takes the rubbish to be incinerated in a power plant, though it is hoped that eventually the collected waste can be sorted and recycled. There is now a whole family of Trash Wheels in Baltimore, the latest addition being Gwynnda, the Good Wheel of the West.

graphic explaining how a Bubble barrier can divert plastic waste but let wildlife through

Or there's the Interceptor, a floating, solar-powered device developed by the non-profit organisation The Ocean Cleanup, billed as the "world's first scalable solution" to rid the oceans of plastic. Similar but larger than the trash wheel, it has barriers that guide rubbish on to a conveyor belt, where a shuttle distributes it among five onboard waste bins.

Another design, the Azure barrier, developed by the UK-based startup Ichthion to operate in any river, can remove up to 80 tonnes of plastic a day using durable, tide-sensitive booms that direct plastic to extraction points along the bank. The plastic is processed into flakes for recycling.

Other more hi-tech inventions include the WasteShark, an electronically controlled "aquadrone" that preys on plastic - up to 350kg at a time. Using algorithms from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, the WasteShark moves around and back to its docking station autonomously, where up to five of the catamaran-shaped vessels can deposit the collected plastic and recharge. The design, developed by a Dutch startup, RanMarine, is due to be showcased at CES 2022 in Las Vegas this month.

The WasteShark aquadrone uses algorithms to move around and back to its docking station autonomously, where it deposits the collected plastic and recharges. Photograph: Handout

While the cost of implementing these technologies may be feasible for some cities and towns - and vastly preferable to the cost of plastic pollution, which it is estimated will reach $7.1tn (£5.25tn) by 2040 - there are many other factors to consider. These include, says Morse, "the physical river characteristics, amount of waste, seasonal changes, ecology, power sources, workforce availability, security, boat traffic [and] funding".

Philip Ehrhorn, co-founder of the Great Bubble Barrier, says: "One of the biggest challenges we face is the lack of regulation regarding plastic pollution in our waterways and thereof the lack of ownership and responsibility for the problem.

"The urgency to solve our plastic pollution problem in rivers is down to forward-thinking water authorities and governments, since plastic is not yet officially considered a water pollutant," he says.

Most of the world's top 20 plastic-polluting rivers are in developing countries. But Ehrhorn adds: "Europe still has a huge issue with plastic pollution, which shouldn't be ignored nor underestimated."

EU laws were introduced in January last year to tackle the "wild west" of plastic waste being dumped in poorer countries; the UK is one of Europe's worst offenders, exporting about 70% of its plastic. But the wildest west lies across the Atlantic: the US is the world's biggest plastic polluter, accounting for more than all EU countries combined.

Plastic and other waste clogging Bangkok's Ladprao canal. Up to 10 tonnes of rubbish are collected from the city's canals everyday. Photograph: Narong Sangnak/EPA

There is no one-size-fits-all solution, says Morse. "Rivers vary immensely in respect to factors such as depth, width, flow and seasonality. What might work in a massive river like the Mississippi in the United States, which flows all year round, likely will not work for a smaller, more seasonal river like the Tijuana in Mexico."

In Ecuador, Ichthion's Azure prototype had problems on the Portoviejo River. Data had suggested the river's depth varied in the wet and dry seasons by two metres; in reality, it fluctuated by as much as four metres within a few days.

Getting support from the local people and permission for new infrastructure can also be difficult. For the Clean Currents Coalition, which is working with eight teams around the world, simplicity works best.

"The most successful solutions have been the simpler technologies - such as booms, barriers and traps - that are manufactured locally and require manual removal of the captured waste," Morse says. This can also create extra jobs.

One example of these is Wildcoast 's "brute boom" at the Los Laureles Canyon, a tributary of the Tijuana River. The double-walled float stretches across the river and allows the boom to move with the changing depth. A suspended steel mesh catches the plastic, which is taken for processing once the boom is full. Reports from San Diego in California suggest that it has succeeded in reducing plastic downstream.

The Interceptor scoops waste from the Klang River near the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. The device, developed by the Ocean Cleanup, is solar-powered. Photograph: Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty

TerraCycle 's river traps, which are installed in some of Bangkok's 1,600 polluted canals, catch up to 2.5 tonnes of waste a day, helping to recycle plastic instead of sending it to landfill.

A German startup, Plastic Fischer, has installed TrashBooms in waterways in Indonesia, India and Vietnam. It advocates a local, low-tech and low-cost approach, using locally manufactured mesh-and-float barriers to catch rubbish.

Many environmentalists argue that these innovations treat the symptoms, not the problem, and that the only real solution is to curb plastic production. But, with plastic manufacturing shipments estimated to have risen by 2.2% last year by the Plastic Industry Association, this is not likely any time soon.

"If we're going to keep producing, consuming and disposing of plastics at, or near, our current rate, our ability to manage it needs to catch up - and quickly," says Morse.

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Meet Mr Trash Wheel - and the other new devices that eat river plastic

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The Great Bubble Barrier is just that - a wall of bubbles. It gurgles across the water in a diagonal screen, pushing plastic to one side while allowing fish and other wildlife to pass unharmed.