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WATER SECURITY
After months of tense negotiation, a half-dozen states have reached an agreement to drastically cut their water usage and stabilize the drought-stricken Colorado River — as long as California doesn’t blow up the deal. The plan would cut water use on the river by roughly a quarter, drying up farms and subdivisions across the Southwest.
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WATER SECURITY
Diminished by climate change and overuse, the river can no longer provide the water states try to take from it.
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WATER SECURITY
In 2014, California legislators, focused on groundwater’s accelerating decline during a prolonged drought, passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. New agencies find making sustainability plans is hard, but easier than persuading growers to accept them.
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DROUGHTS
Many people are familiar with flash floods – torrents that develop quickly after heavy rainfall. But there’s also such a thing as a flash drought, and these sudden, extreme dry spells are becoming a big concern for farmers and water utilities.
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DROUGHTS
Hunnic peoples migrated westward across Eurasia, switched between farming and herding, and became violent raiders in response to severe drought in the Danube frontier provinces of the Roman empire.
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WATER SECURITY
In America’s rush to build the nuclear arsenal that won the Cold War, safety was sacrificed for speed. ProPublica has cataloged cleanup efforts at the 50-plus sites where uranium was processed to fuel the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Even after regulators say cleanup is complete, polluted water and sickness are often left behind.
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WATER SECURITY
Snowcapped mountains generate mountain water runoff and snowmelt, which flow down to streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Around a quarter of the world depends on these natural “water towers” to replenish downstream reservoirs and groundwater aquifers for urban water supplies, agricultural irrigation, and ecosystem support. Carbon mitigation strategies are needed to maintain snowpack throughout the Americas.
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WATER SECURITY
With mountain snowpacks shrinking in the western U.S., new Berkeley Lab study analyzes when a low-to-no-snow future might arrive and implications for water management.
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WATER SECURITY
Texas’ biggest single solution to providing enough water for its soaring population in the coming decades is using more surface water, including about two dozen new large reservoirs. But climate change has made damming rivers a riskier bet.
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ARGUMENT: IRRESPONSIBLE ENVIRONMENTALISTS
Many of the cities of the American southwest would not exist were it not for dams. Dams come with a cost, but removing them without offering alternatives is a folly, Edward Ring writes. If the proponents of dam removal would simultaneously support practical new infrastructure solutions, then rewilding America’s rivers could happen without impoverishing the farms and cities that depend on water,” Ring writes. “There is naïveté, and also nihilism, in fighting to remove the building blocks of civilization without facing the realities of energy and water economics.”
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WATER SECURITY
An emerging deal would cut water deliveries to Southern California — but fall far short of federal demands.
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WATER SECURITY
The megadrought gripping the western states is only part of the problem. Alternative sources of water are also imperiled, and the nation’s food along with it.
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WATER SECURITY
Jackson, the capital city of Mississippi, has been left without safe water to drink and for other uses after its long-neglected water treatment plant broke down Monday.
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WATER SECURITY
A mounting water supply crisis in scorching far-South Texas has left local governments pressed to respond. Two major cities, Brownsville and McAllen, rolled out watering restrictions in recent weeks, but leaders in the South Texas city of Laredo are reluctant to impose substantial restrictions on watering lawns even as water supplies near record lows.
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WATR SECURITY
There are at least half a dozen major Western water pipeline projects under consideration, ranging from ambitious to outlandish.most of these projects stand little chance of becoming reality — they’re ideas from a bygone era, one that has more in common with the world of Chinatown than the parched west of the present.
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WATER SECURITY
Unsustainable water practices, drought and climate change are causing this crisis across the U.S. Southwest. To achieve a meaningful reduction in water use, states need to focus on the region’s biggest water user: agriculture.
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FOOD SECURITY
Increased demand for water will be the No. 1 threat to food security in the next 20 years, followed closely by heat waves, droughts, income inequality and political instability.
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ENERGY SECURITY
It is theoretically possible to generate electricity through the movement of water in locations where seawater and river water meet. This type of technology is called osmotic power generation or blue energy. Though prototypes of this technology have been built, research is still underway to prove that this technology is scalable and reliable.
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WATER SECURITY
Many regions of Earth rely on the accumulation of snow during the winter and subsequent melting in the spring and summer for regulating runoff and streamflow. Water resources will fluctuate increasingly and become more and more difficult to predict in snow-dominated regions across the Northern Hemisphere.
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WATER SECURITY
Climate change is making itself felt across the continent, as severe droughts and scarce rain have forced water restrictions in southern European countries. In northern Italy, more than 100 cities and towns have imposed water consumption limits on residents.
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The long view
Despite Recent Water Supply Improvement, More Cuts Expected for Colorado River, Feds Say
After Lake Mead hit an all-time low two years ago, the Colorado River’s water supply is in a much better position this summer, but it hasn’t improved enough to prevent further cuts this year.