Water

Introduction

"Only 2.5% of the world's water is freshwater.

However, almost all of it is locked up in ice or the ground. Only a tiny fraction overall is available for human use. (USGS)

The world’s underground aquifers are being rapidly depleted. 

Since aquifers can take thousands of years to fill up, there’s not an infinite supply of water. The situation is critical. (NASA)

Water is a limited resource.

"We will always have the same amount of water on the earth, but we can't always use as much as we need." (National Drought Mitigation Center)"

- https://www.truthordrought.com/water 

Though only around 25% of the global population currently faces water scarcity, scientists warn that by 2050 current projections predict that number will rise to 52% of the estimated 9.7 billion humans.

Explained | World's Water Crisis | FULL EPISODE | Netflix

18:42 minute video

Further Reading

Where is Our Water Going?

"Although most water-saving tips focus on household use, far more water is embedded in the things we buy – especially the food we eat.

Currently up to 90% of all managed water is used to grow food. (International Water Management Institute)"

- https://www.truthordrought.com/water 

As you can see in the adjacent graph, the exact percentages of water used between agriculture, industry, and home use vary, especially from one continent to another. 

Discrepancy between exact statistic of how water is used may also lie in the issue that not all agriculture if for food, and some industrial processes are specifically part of food production.

For example slaughterhouse water use and waste might be counted as "industrial" instead of "agricultural", even though it is specifically part of the food industry.

The graph in this article shows how water from the Colorado river is used, split among residential and industrial uses, energy production, then agricultural use is split by type showing major textiles like cotton, but a whopping 55% of the river's withdrawals are used for livestock feed.

The following are listed from greatest use of water, to least.

Diet

70% of global water use is for agriculture. This includes food we eat, crops grown for textiles, cosmetics, and medicine. Some crops like rape produce oils needed as lubricant for sewing machines and other small devices.

Something is Drinking 50% of the Colorado River's Water 19:56 minute video crunches the numbers to see which agricultural activities drink up the most water. 

While 20% of the water shortage in western states is blamed on climate change, evidence indicates that meat and dairy are responsible for 50% of water use. The data shows that there may not even be a water shortage crisis if not for the industry. 

The video also touches on the topic of virtual water when it mentions the farm land used by China and Saudi Arabia to extract water from US aquifers to feed their own livestock, but found that local meat consumption by major American Cities accounts for the majority of the livestock industry's water use.

Virtual Water

"Virtual water" refers to water used to grow crops or raise livestock in one country, which is then shipped to another country. This is particularly problematic when countries export water from regions with serious water shortages. Prime examples include the UK exporting vegetables from India and Saudi Arabia importing alfalfa from California and other western states in the USA to feed Saudi Arabia's dairy cattle.

Resources & Tools

Click the Plant-Based button for apps, calculators, food finders, recipe resources, documentaries and more.

Calls to Action

Levels 1-3

Level 4

Industry & Manufacturing

Industrial Waster Users

The following are not listed in any particular order (as we try to find more data), but represent some of the biggest industrial water consumers. Unfortunately these are also some of the biggest water polluters too, dumping massive amounts of chemicals into drinking and irrigation water. Neither ground nor surface water is safe, but laws and regulations can help when enforced.

Fracking

"Fracking consumes a massive amount of water. In the United States, the average can run between 1.5 million and 9.7 million gallons of water to frack a single well, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The amount depends on a few factors, including the type of well and rock formation. (A fracking operation in the Horn River Basin in Canada, for example, used almost 16 million gallons of water.) Water used for hydraulic fracturing is typically fresh water taken from groundwater and surface water resources. Although there are increasing efforts to use nonpotable water, some of these sources also supply drinking water. U.S. water consumption for fracking is still considered “negligible” compared with other industrial water uses (such as the cooling of coal-fired power plants). But fracking operations can strain resources in areas where freshwater supplies for drinking, irrigation, and aquatic ecosystems are scarce (and often becoming scarcer thanks to climate change). Water used for fracturing is too contaminated to return to its source without extensive treatment and so typically is disposed of deep underground, where it is removed from the freshwater cycle. 

The amount of water used per frack job has grown over time, exacerbating fracking’s impact on water supplies. In fact, a Duke University analysis found that while U.S. producers scaled back on the installation of new wells between 2011 and 2016, the amount of water used for hydraulic fracturing surged. In the already drought-ridden Permian Basin region of West Texas, for example, water use for fracking during those years increased by as much as 770 percent. (Also concerning is the fact that the amount of wastewater generated during a well’s first year of production increased by as much as 1,440 percent during the study period.) The authors predicted fracking’s water footprint—the amount of water used and discarded—could increase by up to 50-fold in some regions by 2030." - according to NRDC

Leather

Oil Extraction (Non-Edible)

"United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates the lifecycle cost of extracting and refining one barrel of oil requires, on average, 1,850 gallons of water." - https://www.fractracker.org/2021/11/oil-and-gas-companies-use-a-lot-of-water-to-extract-oil-in-drought-stricken-california/ 

Click the Transit button to learn about transit options that can help reduce or eliminate your reliance on oil.

Calls to Action

Levels 1-3

Level 3-4

Home Use

Domestic water use accounts for the smallest part of the average person's water footprint, but there are many things we can do, which add up to a lot when done consistently and by more people.

Resources

Calls to Action

These levels of action are listed numerically, but the bulleted suggestions are organized approximately from greatest impact to lesser.

Levels 1-3

Garden Use

Showering

Toilet Water

Kitchen Water

Some foods NEED to be rinsed (quinoa), soaked (kidney beans) or boiled (yucca) to make them safe to eat. Don't avoid these important safety steps just to save water if you're food specifically requires such methods.

Laundry

Bathroom Tap

Leaks

Level 3-4

Some Tips for Re-Wearing Clothes

Items You Shouldn't Re-Wear

This isn't a great idea with underwear like 

which can trap and promote fungal growth especially if you live somewhere warm and wet! Wearing organic materials like cotton or bamboo should also help protect against fungus or yeast since they can breath, while synthetic fabrics are likely to cause infections.

Ideal Clothes to Re-Wear

should be worn at least a few times between washing both to save water AND to help those pieces last longer. The longer you can keep a piece of clothing wearable, the less resources like water are used to create more, and the less materials we send to landfills, where they cause groundwater contamination. I'll wash items like these after just one wash if I managed to make a mess of them on the first day or so, but that's generally to help reduce the chance of staining.

How to Keep Second + Day Old Clothes Tidy

First, you will want to do a quick visual check to make sure you are not storing stained clothing, as this can attract bugs and give stains time to set. If the clothes are fine, consider the following options.

Water Harvesting & Reuse

Click the following buttons to learn how you can harvest and reuse water at home.

Ecology & Water

This section is organized to help tell the story of this portion of the water cycle, and how the water cycle is being disrupted by climate change. By better understanding the physics, biology, and other interacting factors, we can generate more informed plans to maximize our success in repairing our water cycle instead of compounding the drought and flooding crisis.

Bio Water Cycle

Plants are vital to the water cycle with trees working hard to clean water, help water penetrate soils and aquifers, as well as respiring water back up into the atmosphere into clouds that produce rain which refills watersheds far away. 

Flying Rivers

This refers to rain falling in places like the Amazon, the water then being transpired into the atmosophere creating "flying rivers" that can travel long distances, providing rain for farmers in distant countries.

Bio-Rain Corridor

"This term helps describe the continental behavior of rain, it accentuates the importance that biology has on rain patterns, and it connotes eco-restoration possibilities by its similarity to the term biological corridor.

Hubert Savenije, a Dutch hydrologist studied moisture hopping ( aka the small water cycle) in the Sahel in Africa. Moisture hopping is where water vapor blows inland, falls as rain to the ground, and then is evapotranspired to blow further inland. Savenije found that a lot of the rainfall further inland had come from the coastal forests, and that as these forests had been chopped down, the rainfall decreased. [1]"

"Savenije’s student, Ruud van der Ent, modeled the flow of continental water moisture, and found that in South America the water moisture hopped from the North Atlantic ocean into the Amazon rainforests, then was turned southward by the Andes mountain, to hop into southeastern South America. 70% of the water above the Amazon forests ended up in southeastern South America. [2]


Van der Ent found that 80% of the rain in China had moisture hopped across the boreal forests of Scandinavia and Russia."

"Victor Gorshov and Anastasia Makarieva, two Russian atmospheric physicists have looked at the pattern of rainfall on continents. When there are not a continuous corridor of forests the rainfall decreases exponentially as one moves inland (see the D,E,F,G,H arrows in diagram below). When there are forests as in the Amazon in South America, the Congo rainforests in Africa, and the boreal forests of Russia, the rainfall does not decrease as one moves inland, it in fact increases slightly..."


"The forests and vegetation are creating a pathway for the rain to moisture hop inland via the small water cycle. The land is able to absorb the rainfall so that it can evapotranspire back up, to then blow further inland to create more rain. Vegetation also releases bacteria and fungi spores which float up into the air and help the water vapor nucleate into cloud droplets. The forests slow the wind down so that the water vapor has more chance to condense into rain. And the Biotic Pump hypothesis of Makarieva and Gorshov [4], theorizes that when the water vapor evapotranspired by forests condenses into clouds it creates a low pressure area that attracts more water vapor to blow in from the ocean." - https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/bio-rain-corridor


Solution

"In order to restore our rains further inland we need to restore the bio-rain corridor, a chain of vegetation that goes from the coast to further inland. Regreening our coastal cities, rewilding the area outside cities, restoring the various biomes can help decrease drought further inland. Depaving asphalt and concrete so that the earth can absorb rainfall aides the small water cycle." - https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/bio-rain-corridor

Ground Water Recharge

According to our growing understanding of tree roots and aquifers we are learning that "Intermediate Tree Cover Can Maximize Groundwater Recharge in the Seasonally Dry Tropics".

Farms & Industry

Farms, industries, and government organizations not only dumped toxic chemicals into our water supplies, but have removed a lot of natural filters by hunting beavers to near extinction, poisoning birds that spread tree seeds, hunting herbivores that kept understories healthy and trapping or shooting the carnivores that helped keep all the other species in balance.

As a result our waterways are more polluted. Once-forested areas are being stripped of their soil and droughts are creeping over areas that once hosted rich wetlands. Places that are increasingly being destroyed by bigger and stronger wildfires have noticed that where species like beaver have managed to make a return have suffered little to no damage from the flames.

Indicator Species

Indicator species are ones that can only live in under certain conditions, and who indicate the healthiness of an eco system. This can include particularly picky plants who might change colour based on soil composition or disappear all together if conditions are not right. Important and wide-spread species such as the firefly used to be found on almost every continent, but due to light and chemical pollution, habitat destruction, being over harvested for festivals, science and medicine, as well as trampling from tourists, they've disappeared from places that were once famous for their presence.

This section will be updated with other species as we create resource pages about them, and with concrete ways that you or anyone can help them.

Click the Fireflies button to learn more about this fascinating group of insects, and what you can do to help them bounce back from the brink.

Keystone Species

Keystone species are those that help shape an environment in a way that many other species even the landscape itself can flourish. The might be hunters, food for other species, offer shelter or nesting materials, and often serve a myriad of functions to a variety of species.

This section will be updated with other species as we create resource pages about them, and with concrete ways that you or anyone can help them.

Click the Beaver button to learn more about how supporting, protecting, and (where they have been driven to extinction) reintroducing these keystone species can help prevent flooding, improve water quality, grow new forests, recharge ground water, and help boost biodiversity.

Water & Energy 

Humans have been using water for power for over 2,000 years dating back to the Greeks who used it to mill grains and Egyptians who irrigated with the screw wheel, more recently we started damming to produce hydroelectricity. More recent advances are harvesting tidal and wave energy, plus offshore wind offers an options which may have an even gentler ecological impact.

The problem  with dams is that they flood massive areas, creating deep, lightless lakes where species who evolved in shallow, fast moving water are not equipped to live in. Dams also cut of access to ancient spawning grounds which is driving important species such as salmon and eel closer to extinction.

To learn more about the ways we can use water to harness energy click the Energy button or a some of our subtopics.

Water Pumping

The pumping of water takes a larger amount than many people realize. Pumping ground water for agricultural, industry, or public use, moving it between facilities, etc. all require energy since water is a fairly heavy substance.

Tools & Apps

Water Pumping

The pumping of water takes a larger amount than many people realize. Pumping ground water for agricultural, industry, or public use, moving it between facilities, etc. all require energy since water is a fairly heavy substance.

Organizations

International

Africa

Asia

India

Maharashtra

Iraq

Europe

UK

North America

Canada

USA

California

Florida

Georgia

Maine

New York

North Carolina

Oregon

Pennsylvania

South Carolina

Texas

Maps

International

North America

USA

Oceana

Australia

Tasmania

Groups

North America

USA

Oceana

Australia

Grants & Funding

Asia

North America

USA

There are two key outcomes associated with this effort:

Minnesota

Oceana

Australia

Western Australia