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Emergent Water Cartel
Published in Maude Barlow, Tony Clarke, BLUE GOLD, 2017
During the 1990s, new technologies were developed for transporting bulk water supplies to market through water bags and bottled water, as well as pipelines, supertankers, and canals. Although it is argued that bulk water exports will be too expensive to be economically viable, the World Bank warns that all the low-cost, easily accessible water reserves are already tapped. New water supplies, however developed, will be two to three times more expensive. Yet, says the World Bank, the demand will be there regardless of the cost. Nor is desalination of sea water likely to be an adequate substitute for bulk water exports. While some countries will make use of desalination, it is a very expensive and fuel-intensive process. Massive desalination projects would be an option only for countries that have abundant energy supplies, and it would seriously add to global warming — a crisis already exacerbated by fresh water diversion.
Suspended sediment dynamics in a tidal channel network under peak river flow
Published in Fernanda Minikowski Achete, Multiple Scales of Suspended Sediment Dynamics in a Complex Geometry Estuary, 2020
The geographic and seasonal flow concentration leads to several water issues related to agricultural use, habitat maintenance, and water export. On a yearly base, an average of 300 m3s−1 of water is pumped from South Delta to Southern California (http://baydeltaoffice.water.ca.gov/sdb/sdip/features/ccf_diversions.cfm). The pumping rate is designed to keep the 2psu (salinity) line seaward of Mallard Island (MAL) avoiding salinity intrusion in the Delta.
Characteristics of negative and undular surges in an impounded channel
Published in Journal of Hydraulic Research, 2023
Feidong Zheng, Pingyi Wang, Yun Li
The hydraulic studies of negative surges induced by water export from a channel were mainly focused on the maximum reduction in water depth, which was defined as the wave height of a negative surge and was primarily estimated using the approximate method (US Army Corps of Engineers, 1949). In this approach, the Lagrange equation was used to calculate the celerity of the negative surge in the linear wave regime (Maeck & Lorke, 2014). However, in several instances, the wave height and mean water depth can have the same order of magnitude, particularly in excavated canals controlled by high head locks; thus, the nonlinearity becomes a governing feature of the wave evolution mechanism. In addition, the knowledge of the wave attenuation of a negative surge remains limited, although it is necessary to determine the longevity of the surge and evaluate the effects of the surge on the navigation safety. In recent years, very limited studies have been conducted to investigate the unsteady turbulent properties in negative surges, for example, those by Reichstetter and Chanson (2013a, 2013b) and Leng and Chanson (2015).
Rethinking on the methodology for assessing global water and food challenges
Published in International Journal of Water Resources Development, 2020
M. Dinesh Kumar, Nitin Bassi, O. P. Singh
The modelling of virtual water trade, a proxy variable for a country’s deficit/surplus in agricultural production (Kumar & Singh, 2005; Paulsen, 2013), for 152 countries across the world, using the water-land index and per capita virtual water export, showed that the water-land index could be a significant variable explaining virtual water trade. When the water-land index increased, the agricultural export from the country increased linearly. The composite index consisting of the water adequacy index, per capita cultivated land, per capita pastureland and richness coefficient for the pastureland together explained 64% of the milk production potential of countries (in per capita terms).
Why doesn’t every family practice rainwater harvesting? Factors that affect the decision to adopt rainwater harvesting as a household water security strategy in central Uganda
Published in Water International, 2018
Chad Staddon, Josh Rogers, Calum Warriner, Sarah Ward, Wayne Powell
Notwithstanding two ‘Water and Sanitation Decades’ and innumerable global conferences, declarations and programmes, more than 800 million people in developing nations still lack even the most basic levels of personal or household-scale water security (AMCOW, 2008; Siwar & Ahmed, 2014; WHO, 2017; WHO/UNICEF, 2015). Although water is essential for maintaining life and for all social and economic endeavours, several authoritative global reports (e.g., World Water Assessment Programme, 2018; UN-Water, 2015) have suggested that urbanization, population growth, industrialization and increasing per capita consumption of all goods including water mean that by 2030 there could be a 40% global water deficit. In some developing regions – especially sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America – water security will actually deteriorate rather than improve, despite decades of investment in water and sanitation infrastructure (WWAP, 2018). Improving water security at any scale (household, urban, national, etc.) presents a massive challenge in a rapidly growing and globalizing world where local needs might not just outstrip local water resources, but where those resources can also ‘travel’ in the form of physical or embodied exports to other regions (e.g., virtual water export via the global food and horticultural trades, see Allan, 2011; Staddon, 2010). With amplified pressures on water governance through increasing transboundary tensions (explored further by Albrecht et al. in this collection), the deregulatory and laissez-faire impulses of the neoliberal Washington Consensus, climate change uncertainties and anthropogenic pressures, the already severe threat to water security in the Global South is continuing to grow (Bakker, 2012; Lovelle, 2016; Owen & Goldin, 2015).