"In a sustainable community, resource consumption is balanced by resources assimilated by the ecosystem. The sustainability of a community is largely determined by the web of resources providing its food, fiber, water, and energy needs and by the ability of natural systems to process its wastes. A community is unsustainable if it consumes resources faster than they can be renewed, produces more wastes than natural systems can process or relies upon distant sources for its basic needs."
At the launch of A New Climate for Peace, a new report on climate-fragility risks produced for the G7 by a consortium of international partners including the Wilson Center, USAID Deputy Assistant Administrator Christian Holmes called water a common denominator for climate risk.
“How you manage your water programs…has a huge amount to do with how you mitigate the prospect for increased fragility,” he said. “Sometimes it’s the obvious that’s so easy to miss, and I think that the obvious on water as it relates to economic development is, essentially, the question of sustainable water supply.”
One of the most striking infographics from A New Climate for Peace touches on that question of supply. Using data from Oregon State University’s Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database and adapted from a graphic that originally appeared in Popular Sciencelast year, the map shows the world’s most active – and tension-filled – international water basins.
Water is a common denominator for climate risk
The Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database measures not only the frequency of hostile events in a basin, but cooperative ones as well, each on a sliding scale. Hostile events range from declarations of war (zero recorded from 1990 to 2008, the period of time encompassed by the graphic) to leaders using “language of discord.” Cooperative events range from “mild verbal support” to “voluntary unification into a single country.”
The total number of events is indicated by shades of blue – the darker the blue, the more transboundary events, both positive and negative. This is essentially the “hot list” of international water basins – which regions have the most official and unofficial chatter over water.
Circles superimposed on the basins represent the total number of hostile events. As the description text points out, however, “circle size does not automatically translate into conflict danger.” In some places, transboundary institutions and diplomatic frameworks allow different actors to work through their differences. Cooperative hostility, if you will. In the Danube River Basin, for example, the high number of “hostile” events is mitigated by strong cooperative incentives associated with European integration. Likewise in North America, where Canada, the United States, and Mexico share several basins with a high number of hostile events, there is little chance of violent conflict.
Water basins in South Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa are major hotspots with a high number of hostile events and weaker institutional frameworks to mitigate them. The Indus, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Salween, Tigris-Euphrates, and Jordan basins witness a very high number of interactions, suggesting at least that continued dialogue could be a way forward to mitigate the risk of violent conflict or fragility. The Nile Basin has less activity reflecting the stalled negotiations between the basin’s 10 member states to replace colonial-era water agreements. The Mekong Basin, where the largest member, China, does not participate as a full member of the Mekong River Commission, shows less activity as well.
The map does a great job illustrating why it can be difficult to answer the question, where is the highest risk of water-related violence? Tensions between states and other freshwater basin actors isn’t necessarily a sign of impending violence if there’s a framework to resolve them. Likewise, lack of communication over a major natural resource can be a bad sign for cooperation when the resource in question is the Nile. More
More infographics from ‘A New Climate for Peace: Taking Action on Climate and Fragility Risks’ are available on NewClimateforPeace.org.
A scientific model supported by the [UK's] Foreign Office has suggested that society will collapse in less than three decades due to catastrophic food shortages if policies do not change.
However the model does show that our current way of life appears to be unsustainable and could have dramatic worldwide consequences.
Dr Aled Jones, the Director of the Global Sustainability Institute, told Insurge Intelligence: "We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends — that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend.
"The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots.
"In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption."
The model follows a report from Lloyds of London which has evaluated the extent of the impact of a shock scenario on crop production, and has concluded that the "global food system is under chronic pressure."
The report said: "The global food system is under chronic pressure to meet an ever-rising demand, and its vulnerability to acute disruptions is compounded by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation and heightening political instability. More
Cal-Earth Low-cost Sustainable Earthen Housing Solutions Proved Effective and Safe in Earthquakes
Hesperia, Calif., May 5, 2015 -- Cal-Earth Institute today announced they received confirmation that the Superadobe/Earthbag orphanage project built for the Pegasus Children’s Project in the northern Khathmandu valley in Nepal survived the 7.6 magnitude earthquake on 25 April 2015, and the structures are all still standing.
The Superadobe (sandbags/barbed wire) building system developed at Cal-Earth (U.S. Patent #5,934,027) integrates traditional earth architecture with contemporary global safety requirements, and passes severe earthquake code tests in California. The technology has been published by NASA, endorsed by the United Nations, featured in countless world media outlets, and awarded the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004.
A UK organization, Small Earth, built over 40 domes in 2006 for the Pegasus Children’s Project in Nepal, which is home to over 90 children and their caretakers, all of who are confirmed safe after the earthquake. Trained by a Cal-Earth alumni in 2005, Small Earth’s founder, Julian Faulkner, shared the news: "The domes have come through relatively unscathed with just surface cracking to the plasterwork… in the village below the site 15 houses have collapsed and many others are badly damaged with all the villagers now sleeping under tarpaulins in the fields."
Faulkner stated the superficial damage to the buildings is a "testament to the quality of training we received that has enabled us to further develop the technology for use in climates as diverse as the temperate UK, the monsoon-drenched Himalayas and the African savannah." Pegasus is raising funds to rebuild a brick structure that was destroyed during the quake, but feel validated in their choice to build earthbag domes to withstand the extreme conditions.
The Cal-Earth organization is dedicated to addressing the pressing needs of all the Earth’s homeless population and displaced people. The global housing shortage currently includes some 20-40 million refugees and displaced persons, and hundreds of millions more who live in substandard or slum housing. With compounding environmental challenges and the acceleration of natural and man-made disasters, this shortage will only become more severe in the coming decades. Cal-Earth believes the time to act is now, in order to ensure that everyone has a safe and sustainable place to live.
Cal-Earth is responding to the growing need to educate people in the face of compounding environmental challenges and the acceleration of natural and man-made disasters. On May 11, 2015, Cal-Earth will launch its first online class for download and streaming: Introduction to Superadobe. Cal-Earth is working toward raising addition funding to create more online content so that anyone, from anywhere, will be able to learn sustainable earth architecture in person or online. More
About Cal-Earth
Cal-Earth, the California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture, is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to providing solutions to the human need for shelter through research, development, and education in earth architecture. Cal-Earth envisions a world in which every person is empowered to build a safe and sustainable home with their own hands, using the earth under their feet. Currently, Cal-Earth reaches over 1.5 million through worldwide outreach and social media, in addition to more than 1,500 visitors who come to the Hesperia site annually for workshops and tours.
Climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts face many obstacles in fragile and conflict-affected societies. Instead of writing off these situations, however, International Alert’s Janani Vivekananda, Janpeter Schilling, and Dan Smith suggest approaching aid and development differently to proactively build resilience and simultaneously advance climate, development, and peacebuilding goals.
The interlinked challenges of climate change, poverty, and conflict legacies are recognized by academic and practitioner communities. But too often the focus has been limited to unpacking causal connections between climate change and the outbreak of violent conflict. While this emphasis garners significant attention (and much academic infighting), it largely fails to engage on the practical questions of how to respond effectively to climate change and poverty in conflict-affected states.
The concept of resilience, Vivekananda et al. write, is critically important in this context, as it connects disparate government and development efforts in service of society as a whole. Understanding the “intermediate” factors that already make a society vulnerable to conflict – poor governance, geopolitics, poverty, inequality – is vital to creating positive development, adaptation, and peacebuilding policies.
Context Is Everything
Understanding the local variation of societies, the “contextual complexities,” should be the first step for any resilience-building operation, the authors write. Local and national-level dynamics need to be considered in tandem to understand how changes in one place might affect elsewhere.
Experience in Nepal provides useful lessons. Nepal is one of the most vulnerable states to climate change and environmental risks in the world. An International Alert case study explores how aid designed to combat food insecurity there ended up undermining adaptive capacity. Rice paddies were created in communities that previously relied on other forms of agriculture, consequently creating a dependency and expectation for more due to the positive social implications that come with having rice in the diet. The shift to rice farming also increased the demand for water.
The study highlights how this change combined with climate-induced changes to rainfall has resulted in water shortages. The reduction of a specific resource in a setting already undergoing environmental change affected community resilience in a negative way. Greater contextual awareness of the implications of such a fundamental change to agriculture might have enabled the government and local communities to avoid such a “backdraft” effect.
Cross-Discipline Analysis
Climate change brings with it a new degree of uncertainty and unpredictability. Informal or formal institutions that embrace the complexities and flux will help societies do the same.
To adjust, Vivekananda and colleagues suggest better collaboration to break down existing institutional barriers and stovepipes between institutions. Multidisciplinary and integrated development efforts increase the likelihood of coherent climate and conflict-sensitive approaches to development, peacebuilding, and humanitarian actions. In turn, collaborative efforts are more likely to build long-term resilience, as communities rarely face a single risk in isolation, as highlighted in the Nepal case.
Academic fields, they suggest, should work towards common risk analyses. This integration entails the identification of possible negative outcomes, such as conflict; the determination of origins of said negative outcomes, such as political instability or environmental change; and shared evaluation amongst disciplines about how to fix the problem.
Vivekananda et al. work through the negative cycle that can emerge when climate change leads to conflict. Existing fragility can increase vulnerability and human insecurity, potentially leading to conflict. Identifying what makes a society fragile in the first place will provide more transparency regarding what will improve resilience.
For example, they cite a report produced by the humanitarian NGO Mercy Corps on conflict and severe drought in Ethiopia. Southern Ethiopia is home to some of the most vulnerable people to climate change: pastoralists. The report found that access to resources was one of these groups’ fundamental challenges. “Improving social cohesion and local institutions for conflict mitigation enhances access to natural resources,” they wrote, and “pastoralist groups with greater access recover more quickly from drought.”
The importance of integrated responses was also highlighted in A New Climate for Peace, a new report produced on behalf of the G7 by adelphi, the European Union Institute for Security Studies, International Alert, and the Wilson Center. The report says that by integrating efforts to address climate change, the international community will be better equipped to mitigate its interconnected risks while realizing important co-benefits. Recommendations include making climate change a foreign policy priority for all G7 members and using their clout to create a global resilience agenda.
Redundancy and Lack of Action
The literature on climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience frequently places great importance on the need to bridge the gap between academic disciplines and research communities, but relatively little action has been taken. Vivekananda et al. suggest this shortcoming could be because of the heavy focus on quantitative literature in examining the implications of climate change for conflict. Calling for more collaboration and increased multidisciplinary research is easier than doing it in practice with sufficient funds and willing partners.
So how do we incentivize more cross-sectoral work? Finding answers should be a priority. As more at-risk countries consider resilience programs, the potential for negative unintended consequences increases. Ambiguity surrounding important factors such as incentives can discourage local communities and governments from even attempting multisectoral approaches.
Vivekananda et al. suggest that incentives could be derived from better resourcing, political support, and increased transparency and clarity around what the concept of resilience building actually means. The G7 report and 2014 5th Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change largely agree. The IPCC’s Working Group II dedicates an entire section to “trade-offs, synergies, and integration” in its assessment. And the G7 report says integration may become more enticing as different parties realize the benefits that it can bring.
These discussions about climate change in fragile and conflict-affected areas are important resources for policymakers. Government, the academy, and non-government organizations should act in earnest on their main message: dissolve ambiguity around key concepts, integrate responses, and build up the capacity of fragile states to make simultaneous progress on climate change, development, and peacebuilding goals. More
We live in a world of growing resource scarcity. The oft-quoted statistic is that by 2050 two thirds of the world’s population will live in areas of water stress or scarcity.
Currently, agriculture is the largest user of water, but as the World Bank’s Thirsty Energyinitiative points out, increasing demands for energy will also require increasing use of freshwater. And as populations rise, so will the need for more water and energy for food production.
So could decentralised, off-grid solutions hold the key? For many years, influencers have debated whether community-based, off-grid schemes can deliver energy sustainably. But this battle has not yet been won. Recently new lines have been drawn by Bill Gates, who called for centralised, fossil-fuel based electrification to solve energy poverty and SunEdison founder Jigar Shah who responded by putting forward the case for distributed renewable solutions.
While this debates goes on at the policy level, what do experiences on the ground tell us? At Practical Action, we have found that micro hydropower (or microhydro) systems, which produce power from streams and small rivers, provide huge potential for sustainable energy.
For example in Peru, microhydro systems installed in the mid- to late-1990s are still running today. Not only do they provide electricity for light bulbs and other small appliances, they can also supply continuous power for local clinics, allow people to use fridges and run small businesses. We found they reduced household energy expenditure by more than half, and 60% of families said their incomes had increased.
However, there is still unexplored potential for decentralised hydropower. In both Peru and Nepal (where micro-hydro schemes are widespread), there was rarely any deliberate attempt to connect the electricity generated to agricultural systems, or to make use of the channelled water for irrigation. This means missing out on a set of potentially transformational opportunities. Decentralised energy systems can not only improve energy access, but also help to maximise the relationships between water, energy and food, both now and in the future.
More recently, and learning from our experiences, we have been making the connection between agriculture and energy more directly. Together with Oxfam we have been working in Zimbabwe, for example in the Himalaya scheme which uses the electricity generated by the microhydro plant, as well as the channelled water, for much-needed irrigation.
The approach does of course have it’s challenges. Across the schemes we’ve developed in Zimbabwe familiar challenges and trade-offs emerge, particularly with a recent severe two-year drought followed by heavy rains. For example, in Chipendeke in Zimbabwe, initial planning for hydropower failed to fully accommodate existing irrigation needs. As a result during the dry season, there was insufficient water to run both the irrigation and the hydro simultaneously. Eventually the villagers reached a compromise where the microhydro plant was switched off for short periods to allow more water for irrigation.
In Ngarura, there were delays in construction of the microhydro project and farmers lost trust. They continued cultivating the steep river banks, and when the rains came there was heavy siltation of the system. The lesson there was that farmers have to be convinced of the benefit of the scheme in order to preserve the river banks.
Despite these problems, in both cases solutions were reached through dialogue and the community balancing their priorities. It is important not only to focus on the infrastructure for hydropower but also the institutions to support it and that is as much part of increasing resilience as the energy or water itself.
Development organisations can sometimes be rightly accused of being starry-eyed about the potential of community ownership and management. In the case of a microhydro plant this can impose unrealistic burdens, and in the absence of support structures from local technicians, spare parts, and a clear sense of ownership infrastructure can quickly fall into disuse. But the sector has been learning, as research shows. The right systems for decentralised energy production can be created and it can provide a sustainable solution to energy poverty. More
Late rains were unusually heavy this year, say local farmers, affecting winter crops of wheat, oilseed and potato.
Anxious farmers in Pakistan waited for weeks for the rains to arrive – but when the skies finally opened, the downpour was so intense it destroyed crops and put the harvest in jeopardy.
"We weather scientists are really in shock, and so are farmers, who have suffered economic losses due to crop damage," says Muzammil Hussain, a weather forecasting scientist at the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD).
"The wind from the southeast has carried moisture from the Arabian Sea. Normally, the northeast wind brings rain during winter, and the southeast wind brings monsoon rains in summer. But the pattern has changed this year because of what is believed to be global warming."
Farmers across much of Pakistan plant winter crops of wheat, oilseed and potato late in the year and wait for rains to water the land.
This year, the rains arrived more than three weeks late and were unusually heavy, accompanied by violent hailstorms. Along with the rains, temperatures also dropped.
Ibrahim Mughal, chairman of the Pakistan Agri Forum, says excessive moisture due to heavy bouts of late rain is likely to lead to outbreaks of fungus on crops, and production could be halved.
"If the rains come a month ahead of the harvesting time [April to mid-May], it is always disastrous," he says. "It can hit production for a crop such as wheat by between 20% and 30%, and if the rain is accompanied by hailstorms and winds then the losses can escalate to more than 50%."
Arif Mahmood, a former director general at PMD, says the onset of winter across much of Pakistan is being delayed by two to three days every year, and there is an urgent need for farmers to adapt to such changes.
"Over recent years, winter has been delayed by 25 to 30 days, and also the intensity of the cold has increased, which has affected almost every field of life − from agriculture to urban life."
This year has also been marked by abrupt changes in temperature. Ghulam Rasul, a senior scientist at PMD, says big swings in temperature are likely to add to the problems being faced by millions of farmers in Pakistan.
"The average temperature during the first two weeks [of March] was between 11 and 13 degrees Celsius, but now it’s on a continuous upward trend and has reached 26˚C over the space of two days," he reports.
"The winter rains in the north and central area of Pakistan, and the sudden rise and fall in temperature, are related to climate change."
Serious damage
Similar storms and late winter rains have also caused serious damage across large areas of northern India.
The states of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra – the two most populous states in the country – have been particularly badly hit.
In Maharashtra, snow and landslides have blocked roads and cut off towns and villages.
In Uttar Pradesh, there are fears that more than 50% of the wheat crop has been lost in the eastern part of the state. More
For the Pakistan Metorlogical Department to claim be shocked by this event says to me that they have obviously not been following the global climate change discussion. Farming methods and water control and harvesting will have to change to mitigate the changing climate. Permaculture farming methods would be a good place to start. See http://permaculturenews.org/about-permaculture-and-the-pri/ Editor
LAS VEGAS – The patroller stopped his water district truck and grabbed his camcorde "Here we go," he said, sliding from the cab and pointing his lens at the fine spray of water and rainbow rising from pop-up sprinklers on the lawn of a low-slung ranch home.
Central Arizona Project Canal
"Thursday," he spoke, recording the day as evidence. No watering allowed on Thursdays.
Welcome to the future, where every drop of Colorado River water is guarded and squeezed. Only here, in the city that gets 90 percent of its water from the fickle and fading river, the future is now.
The vast and highly urbanized Southwest, built on the promise of a bountiful river propped up by monumental dams, is up against its limits. Already tapped beyond its supply, the river is now threatened by a warming climate that shrinks its alpine source.
To support fast-growing urban populations in a time of dwindling supply, the Southwest is due for rapid and revolutionary changes.
A region that uses two-thirds of its water outdoors, and mostly for agriculture, will have to find ways of sharing and boosting efficiency — a shift that many experts believe will mean city dwellers paying to upgrade rural irrigation systems.
Cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, which have reduced their per-person water usage through better landscaping and appliances, will have to do better. They lag behind Los Angeles, whose growing population, by necessity, uses no more water than it did 40 years ago.
Water suppliers from Denver to San Diego will spend billions of dollars to squeeze more out of each drop, and to clean and use wastewater and salt water. It means a future of higher water bills, further promoting conservation.
Problem can't be deferred
"We're in a drought," water patroller Robert Kern said after hanging a warning notice on the home's doorknob. Two more violations and the water district will fine the owner $80.
"Everyone has to do their part."
Residents in this part of town — known as Zone C to the Las Vegas Valley Water District — may only water on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from fall through spring. They're freer to soak their grass at will in summer, when the withering heat demands it.
The cooler months are for austerity, to give the plummeting water levels behind Hoover Dam a break. The river's massive storage tub, Lake Mead, is draining.
The Colorado isn't all that we thought it would be when we divvied up the rights in the Roaring '20s. Most years, it gives less than it once did, and there are more users taking from it.
A 2012 government study of supply and demand predicted a 2060 annual shortfall of nearly a trillion gallons — enough to cover the sprawling city of Phoenix 9 feet deep or to supply 6 million Southwestern households for a year.
How the Southwest's leaders, farmers and lawn waterers respond will help decide how many millions of people this drying corner of the continent can sustain in the next century.
Throughout this year, The Arizona Republic will examine the twin stresses of climate change and population growth, and ways to ensure reliable water for the next generation of Southwesterners.
"This is not one of the problems you can defer and let your grandkids deal with," said Doug Kenney, a University of Colorado law professor.
Last year, the Arizona Department of Water Resources published a "strategic vision" for the coming century. The department stopped short of calling the state's current situation a "crisis," but said Arizona is at a "crossroads" and needs to decide on actions to secure new water.
Many potentially costly steps for metro Phoenix were included: conservation, treated water recycling, watershed forest thinning, cloud seeding and seawater desalination among them.
Kenney chairs the newly formed Colorado River Research Group, an independent group of 10 river and climate experts from regional universities. This winter, they made a simple recommendation that would have sounded outlandish in the past century.
Use no more water.
Cities will have to grow within their means, through conservation and by paying farmers to save and transfer water, he said. When the river already falls short of supplying everyone who has a legal right to it, there's no sensible way of taking more from it.
"If everyone takes what they're legally entitled to," Kenney said, "the system crashes."
That's true even if the wetter 20th century hydrology repeats. But that's not what the big water suppliers are expecting.
Actual flow of Colorado River versus water promised for Southwest
Agreements have promised 16.5 million acre-feet of water annually to come out of the Colorado River for use by Western states and Mexico. But in many years, the actual flow of the Colorado has been lower than what’s promised, which is marked by the solid line. The 110 year average is shown by the dotted line.
"In my opinion, the future of the Colorado Basin is a future where we have less water than we have right now," said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
"The future of the Colorado Basin also has less grass."
But it won't be just the urban lawns that attract scrutiny. Farmers from Wyoming to Mexico — by far the biggest users of the river — will have to back off on hay production
They'll also have to embrace expensive but efficient drip irrigation, Entsminger said. Urban water users will help pay for that through higher rates.
"Everybody's going to have to figure out how to do the same or more with less water."
Robert Kern, a Waster Water Investigator for the Las Vegas Valley Water District, documents a watering restriction violation in a west-central Las Vegas neighborhood. Las Vegas residents are only allowed to water on assigned days, Kern issued a warning to the homeowner.
At Lake Mead, America's most voluminous water impoundment when it was full and a lifeline to everyone from Phoenix to San Diego, the crisis has already arrived.
Lake Mead Water Level
Desiccated palm trees flap over the cracked and peeling shell of a resort hotel at Echo Bay Marina at the northern end of the lake, the tattered banners of a man-made oasis now drained and vacant. Dormant boat docks lie stacked against each other.
To nearby innkeeper Chris Wiggins, it's a sign of government mismanagement.
"Climate change?" he scoffed. "That's the biggest joke."
You don't have to believe in a climate connection to recognize the risks in doling out on paper more water than a river can give.
"In the lower basin, we use more water than in a normal year we receive," said Chuck Cullom, Colorado River program manager for the Central Arizona Project, whose canal pumps water to Phoenix and Tucson.
"Even absent the drought we would still be facing a declining Lake Mead."
A sustained regional drought that started in the late 20th century shrank the reservoir to its record low by last summer. Federal officials say there's a 1-in-4 chance it will sink low enough — to 1,075 feet above sea level — by next year that Arizona will have to cut back substantially on what it takes from the river.
After that, the government projects, the odds are better than even — about 60 percent — for a declared shortage and restrictions in 2017.
The reservoir has fallen by more than 100 feet since 2000. Its stored water, paired with upriver sister reservoir Lake Powell, is at about half-capacity.
The water's retreat is a slow-blooming crisis that many have seen coming for years. Some communities have used the time to curb their thirst.
Los Angeles residents use 129 gallons a day each. That's stingier than the 160-gallon average in Phoenix, whose use rate has nonetheless plummeted in recent years.
Now, though, even conservation-minded Los Angeles is following the unlikely lead of a gaudy, electrified billboard for sustainability. Still ridiculed in some corners as a wasteful and whimsical boomtown in the desert, metro Las Vegas has nonetheless turned its precarious relationship with the river into a powerful incentive to cut back.
Southern Nevadans use 212 gallons a day, which is more than their counterparts in either Los Angeles or Phoenix. But they also return almost 40 percent of that to the river as treated and reusable wastewater, making their net usage rate 124 gallons.
They have slashed usage steeply and deeply, by more than 100 gallons in about a decade.
Las Vegas has cut use of the river by nearly a third in a 12-year period that saw its metro population grow by 25 percent.
Vegas did it by regulating outdoor watering, and by paying $205 million — up to $2 a square foot — to entice people to remove lawns and "embrace living in the Mojave Desert," Entsminger said.
That was crucial, because in 2002, Nevada was using more than its legal entitlement to the river.
Now Los Angeles is following, paying homeowners even more money to strip lawns.
For decades, the Colorado River hasn't typically flowed as high as it did about a century ago, when Congress authorized impounding it at what would become Hoover Dam.
Climate scientists say there's a strong chance it never — or rarely — will again. Yet unlike in those pioneering days of last century, more than 30 million people and several billion dollars in farm production are now counting on a river that is so tapped that in most years it no longer reaches the sea.
What's left after the U.S. uses most of the water is diverted to farmers in Mexico.
"The Colorado River Compact appears to have been negotiated during an unusually wet period," said Connie Woodhouse, a University of Arizona geosciences professor who has studied historic flows on the river. "I don't think anyone would argue with that."
The 1922 agreement split the river's flow between upper- and lower-basin states, with the divide just upstream of Grand Canyon, at Lees Ferry. In the first few decades of the 20th century, an average approaching 17 million acre-feet — each acre-foot gushing 326,000 gallons, 51/2 trillion gallons in all — flowed past Lees Ferry every year.
For most of the past 90 years, though, the average flows have sagged below even the 15 million acre-feet that the states legally share, let alone the 1.5 million owed to Mexico by treaty.
The enormous but shrinking reservoirs at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, capturing spikes in runoff during occasional wet years, have forestalled shortages. The flow was 20 million acre-feet in 2011, and just half that in 2013.
That Colorado, Wyoming and Utah weren't using their full shares also postponed a reckoning.
Until now.
The drought that started in 2000 and sent the reservoir holdings plunging is a preview of expected dry spells unprecedented in recent centuries, Woodhouse said. Temperatures are higher than those of the last century's droughts, compounding the intensity.
"The (rising) temperatures are only going to exacerbate conditions that we would normally expect under natural conditions," she said.
There are lots of reasons to think the droughts of coming decades will be worse than anything we've ever experienced — regardless of whether there's any change in precipitation.
The first is that as the region warms, the trees and plants using the snowmelt will need and tap more of it before it ever reaches the river or pipes.
The next and arguably bigger threat is that the warmth will melt snow faster or even make it fall instead as rain. Either change will lead to more evaporation and less seepage into the soils that, in turn, release water to streams feeding the river.
Four years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation — the Southwest's federal water managers — crunched all of the climate model projections for the Colorado River watershed and determined the average outlook was for a river pumping 9 percent less water through the region by 2050.
There is always a chance that monstrous snowstorms and winter rains will bring enough new winter precipitation to offset the warming's worst effects, said Jeff Lukas, climate scientist with the University of Colorado's Western Water Assessment team.
"Increasing flow isn't precluded," he added. "It just appears to be less likely."
Past warm spells, etched as living history in the West's tree rings and lake beds, indicate that where there's heat there's often stinging drought, according to Woodhouse's work.
She co-authored a 2010 study using regional tree rings from an unusually long and hot medieval drought to project that each increase of a degree Celsius results in a decrease in Colorado River flows of between 2 percent and 8 percent.
Most of the region already has warmed by more than a degree on average in the past quarter-century, according to last year's U.S. National Climate Assessment. Further warming of at least a couple of degrees in a few decades and up to 5 degrees by 2100 is expected even if global carbon emissions are substantially reduced.
The medieval drought, in its worst decade, baked the river down to about two-thirds of what the U.S. and Mexico draw out of it today.
The drought lasted 60 years, but it was not as hot as today. So it seems the next time there's a repeat of whatever natural phenomena conspired back then to produce such a long, dry spell, the river will be even drier.
Since Woodhouse's study, a team of 14 university and government researchers has conducted what Woodhouse calls the "best synthesis" of existing climate and flow models — with jaw-dropping, if imprecise, predictions.
The river's flow probably will drop between 5 percent and 35 percent in response to warming by midcentury, according to that team, which published a January 2014 report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Lukas' University of Colorado colleague, snow researcher Jeffrey Deems, said there's reason to believe the bureau's predicted 9 percent reduction in flow is optimistic.
Already, the Rocky Mountain snowpack is melting three to six weeks earlier than before American settlement of the region, Deems' studies have found, because dust drifting up from grazing lands and other disturbances collects solar heat on the snow's surface. Today's snowmelt is measured by direct observation and compared with computer models of older trends.
Without emissions curbs, Deems said, his modeling and others project flows slashed by about a fifth on average by midcentury.
"Even if it's only 9 percent," he said, in a nod to the Bureau of Reclamation study, "that's a huge shock to any overallocated system."
A 9 percent reduction would roughly equal the 1.5 million acre-feet that Arizona is allowed to pump through CAP's 336-mile canal every year.
But that's a midcentury outlook with lots of climate variables. What about the near-term effects of the existing drought?
If the government declares a Lake Mead shortage because the water drops below the mandated trigger elevation of 1,075 feet — the 58 percent probability that managers have projected by 2017 — then Arizona would lose 320,000 acre-feet every year that the water is so low.
An acre-foot of water is about the amount two Southwest families use each year. So the loss would be about three times the potable water that Tucson Water pumps to customers each year. But it's not the cities and their residents who will suffer first or most.
CAP was built largely to fuel growth in metropolitan areas of Arizona. The farmers who have used what until now was excess water have the lowest legal priority. Some of them will voluntarily cut back on watering hay and other crops this year, in an effort to help keep Lake Mead from falling.
In December, CAP signed an agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation and water providers for Southern California and Nevada to save 740,000 acre-feet over the next three years, and to keep it in Lake Mead. Each of those organizations would sacrifice water or improve efficiency.
Arizona, with the most to lose from a shortage, is responsible for the largest share: 345,000 acre-feet.
Of that, the deepest cuts — nearly half — will come out of farm irrigation districts. But CAP will pay those farmers $5 million.
"It could actually protect us (from shortage) for a couple of years, and that would more than repay our efforts." said Cullom, CAP's Colorado River program manager.
But in the same agreement, the states predicted that these savings might be only half the job of restoring reliable water by 2019. So they also will join Denver Water in sponsoring $11 million in pilot programs that other customers can use to suppress their needs — some of it perhaps for farm upgrades such as drip irrigation or laser field leveling.
If Lake Mead drops another 25 feet after the first shortage, central Arizona would lose nearly a third of what it draws off the Colorado. Farmers there would get nothing from the river, and cities such as Phoenix, Mesa and Scottsdale could start to lose some of the canal water they're now leasing from Indian tribes.
Best to act now, Cullom said, and reload Lake Mead.
"It's like a scene from 'Jaws,' when one of the characters says, 'We need a bigger boat,' " he said. "We're trying to find ways to get a bigger boat."
Some water managers and politicians have mused about importing the solution, from the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River Basin by pipe, or even from Alaska by ship. But the U.S. Interior Department effectively called those schemes pipe dreams, in a study of options for the Southwest.
For one thing, other states may guard their resources as jealously as Arizona would covet them in a water-strapped future. The Great Lakes states even have a compact prohibiting export, and it is being invoked to prevent a Wisconsin county that touches on the drainage from piping water over the line.
Also, the costs, both environmental and financial, caused the Obama administration to reject the idea. Pumping water from the Missouri River to Denver would cost 21/2 times the predicted price to conserve the same amount within the Southwest.
Conservation probably can provide only a third of the new water needed in 50 years.
Environmentalists generally have recommended starting there, though, and then adding treatment plants to clean salt from used irrigation water and return it to the river. Utility managers are also looking to add costlier, more energy-intensive seawater desalination, which could reduce coastal cities' reliance on the river.
An old car on the Baker Ranch near Baker, Nev.
The biggest sponge out there, though, is agriculture. Its use of two-thirds of the Colorado's bounty offers future urban residents a tantalizing buffer for growth — or a water grab — if it can be reallocated.
About a third of the Colorado River's annual flow goes just to alfalfa, pasture and other forage for livestock, according to a 2013 analysis of farming in the 256,000-square-mile watershed, conducted by the Pacific Institute.
Much of that grass is flood-irrigated, putting to work water that farmers earned through settlement claims under a "use it or lose it" system that predates the West's urban population explosion.
The institute modeled other options for ranchers — modern irrigation equipment and a more judicious schedule for watering — and projected a potential savings of 1 million acre-feet a year.
Farmers won't give up water if they think it means losing their rights to it, and to the income it can bring them, said Kenney, the University of Colorado law professor. But states are free to change the laws, to ditch "use it or lose it." They can ensure that farmers and rural areas are compensated.
Kenney expects change to come, and city dwellers to pay up, as the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District is doing in an experimental program that gives 33 farmers $750 per acre per year for three years to cut and fallow some citrus orchards.
"Scarcity drives innovation," he said.
Back in Las Vegas, water patroller Robert Kern spotted a wet sidewalk near the first violator he nabbed. It wasn't a sprinkler, though. What grass the lawn had was yellowed and crisp.
"I had to mow her lawn the other day because I was afraid there'd be a fire," said a neighbor, Danny Hinchcliffe, standing on his own dewy grass.
Kern climbed from the truck, knelt to find moss growing in a slight but steady stream of water flowing from a broken underground pipe. He attached another warning to her doorknob.
Hinchcliffe said his own yard used to be rock, but he switched to grass because it helped cool his home and keep down the electric bill.
Reminded that his grass blades shouldn't be glistening with water on a day when sprinkling is banned, he said his landscaper likely hadn't had a chance to adjust his timer for the season.
But he didn't get a citation.
Kern can't issue a warning or a ticket unless he actually sees the water spraying.
"Our biggest thing is education," he said. "Without the water, we're not going to be here.
News: ADB Spotlights Pakistan’s Water Assessment and Management Plan
September 2014: The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has published a report titled ‘Water Balance: Achieving Sustainable Development through a Water Assessment and Management Plan – The Case of Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Pakistan.' The report presents the case of the development of the FATA Water Assessment and Management Plan, outlining elements necessary in such assessment, and emphasizing that inefficient and unsustainable management of development initiatives result from lack of information about water availability and cause watershed degradation.
Integrated water resources management (IWRM) was used as a core approach in the development of possible activities to promote the sustainable use of water resources in the FATA region. While noting much of the data used is historical, the report emphasizes that climate change is likely to alter current water availability patterns, and calls for integrating hydrological forecasting and climate change models into the assessment.
Many of the projected effects of climate change on the world’s oceans are already visible, such as melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels. But invisible changes may be the most threatening to human food sources, beginning with the tiny species like plankton that inhabit the bottom of the oceans’ food chain.
Strength in numbers: A satellite’s view of billions of E. huxleyi, blankets of tiny plankton floating off the east coast of southern England. Credit: NASA
As emissions from human activities increase atmospheric carbon dioxide, they, in turn, are modifying the chemical structure of global waters, making them more acidic.
Many researchers have speculated that most aquatic species won’t be able to adapt in time to survive the acidification that has already begun, but there are some who are more optimistic. One of them is Jennifer Sunday, a postdoctoral ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Canada’s Simon Fraser University.
“You hear people say species aren’t going to adapt in time,” she explained in an interview, “but I just knew that we don’t really know that. This really motivated me to start thinking about a study to test this. We can and did put some science and data to this question.”
Sunday and her team published a review earlier this year in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, aiming to help researchers improve their chances of finding potential survivors. It suggests that more studies should focus on identifying species with enough genetic variety to produce a mutant that can adapt.
Sunday feels that the better researchers get at searching for adapters, the more will be found.
The process that creates this risk is swift and globe-spanning. Oceans absorb roughly a quarter of the rising CO2 emissions from the atmosphere, so as that concentration increases, the oceans absorb more of the gas. In the past 150 years, human-induced climate change has changed the ocean acidity from roughly pH 8.3 to pH 8. (In the pH scale, 1 is most acidic, 7 is neutral and 14 is basic, or least acidic).
“It’s anywhere from 10 to 100 times faster than anything we’ve seen over the last million years,” said Richard Feely, a chemical oceanographer and senior researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “That’s just according to our good records.” And acidity is only expected to rise.
“By the end of this century,” Feely said, “projections are an increase by another 100 to 130 percent.”
Which tiny sea creatures can win the lottery?Changes in pH levels can have massive effects on marine life, a fact that has led many scientists to believe that most species can’t withstand large increases in acidification. When CO2 mixes with ocean waters, it binds calcium molecules that are usually free for marine creatures to build shells. The more acidic waters can also corrode existing shells.
Sunday isn’t the first to try and isolate survivor species. Several teams worldwide have already been exploring the potential of marine life species to adapt to predicted climate changes.
In 2009, a European team published their research on the tiny circular plankton Emiliania huxleyi, made up of light-reflecting mineralized calcium ovals. These tiny plankton sometimes float in populations so large, they’ve been spotted from outer space.
Looking at strains of the plankton under varying CO2 levels, researchers found that while some plankton had difficulties forming their shells when the water was more acidic, others did not, causing researchers to speculate that the plankton might be able to use another form of calcium to substitute in shell making. Other studies have shown that certain species thought incapable of evolving quickly can, in fact, rapidly adapt.
Evolution is like a lottery. The faster a species reproduces, the greater the number of unique ticket combinations it creates in the genes of its offspring. For species that produce the right genetic mutation, their number is drawn and the prize is survival.
“This is particularly important when you want to look at a species’ ability to cope with change,” said Jennifer Pistevos, a master of research student at the Marine Biological Association, who studied clone populations of Celleporella hyalina, a tiny organism she found to have an amazing ability to reproduce in both more acidic and warmer water conditions.
“Faster reproduction rates give us a chance to see how vulnerable a species is,” Pistevos said.
In 2012, Sunday and colleagues spanning three continents reviewed past studies, and based on this work, propose future research dedicated to efforts to locate adapters by incorporating more experimental evolution into the studies.
Experimental evolution identifies members of a species born with the winning genetic ticket instead of those who can come up with the correct number during their lifetime. Being born with the winning ticket means these individuals may be able to ride the acidifying tides in the kind of time frame needed—which is immediately.
Questions that can’t be answered in the labSunday and her team also suggest more work should consider a species’ response to multiple environmental changes, such as increased temperature and oxidation levels, as well as multiple stages of life. Currently, many studies only follow a species at a specific point in its members’ lives, such as infancy. Without tracking an organism over its life span and in a complicated and changing environment, it’s hard to say whether observed changes will translate into overall survival.
Although Sunday sees her work as laying the groundwork for less pessimistic predictions of the future fate of marine life, not everyone agrees that the approach is realistic. Aran Mooney, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who studies the effects of ocean acidification on Atlantic long-fin squid larvae, said some methods Sunday recommends are not practical for studying all species.
“Overall, the review is very good for us,” he said. “The authors point out some great goals and the limitations we face.” But for species like squid, Mooney said, Sunday’s suggestions are unlikely to be used.
“Measuring squid evolution in the lab might be doable to some extent,” Mooney said, “but it isn’t really possible to raise multiple generations or even young to adult—[they] don’t do all that well in captivity.”
Though Sunday agreed that predicting exactly how oceans will look in the future remains hard, researchers are starting to look in the right places. “The question just seemed too difficult before,” she said. “We wanted to put our advice out there so people could see it’s not impossible for species to adapt in time.”
“I do predict some species will adapt,” concluded Sunday, “but not all. Ultimately, it’s pretty shocking to think we’ll be losing species and it will be because of us.” More
The third in a series. To see the first two parts, click here and here.
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