Water Resource Management

[gerontocrat]

The only thread specifically about water is in "Consequences- Water Wars".
A thread about how humankind is, or is not managing water resources seems a good idea. 
Time will tell.

an example....
This study gives a really good look at the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of desalination and possibilities for the future. It also shows that we are talking big numbers.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KZxjEYk01HEdmDhsLmF4RzV5UXu-mwBd/view
The state of desalination and brine production: A global outlook

Apart from the problem of brine production (salt and other ooh-nasty trace elements being concentrated and dumped in the ocean (shown by the study to be underestimated), the study also shows that at the moment the cost limits the use of the fresh water produced to domestic and industrial use in relatively high income countries.

There is a BBC article based on this study at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46863146 . It finishes on an optimistic note - we will see.
 
Concerns over increase in toxic brine from desalination plants

"There is an urgent need to make desalination technologies more affordable and extend them to low-income and lower-middle income countries. At the same time, though, we have to address potentially severe downsides of desalination - the harm of brine and chemical pollution to the marine environment and human health," said Dr Vladimir Smakhtin, a co-author of the paper from the UN University.

"The good news is that efforts have been made in recent years and, with continuing technology refinement and improving economic affordability, we see a positive and promising outlook."

[etienne]

Water is not only an issue when thinking about desalination pollution. Glaciers are melting and once melting is over the water situation becomes critical.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-23944385

[Archimid]

The ultimate survival tool. Water out of thin air:

How Zero Mass is using solar panels to pull drinkable water directly from the air

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16690042/zero-mass-solar-panel-harvesting-clean-drinking-water-next-level

Because that’s what Zero Mass does: harvest drinking water out of thin air, using a combination of materials science, solar power, and predictive data. The goal is to use this technology to go from a position of “water scarcity to water abundance,” said founder and chief executive Cody Friesen, regardless of whether you’re in an area where access to clean water is a serious problem, or living in a place where bottled water is often half-drunk and discarded.

[Sigmetnow]

The ice stupas of Ladakh: solving water crisis in the high desert of Himalaya

But addressing the water shortages that threatened life in his mountainous home had started to feel like an intractable problem until he saw the chunk of ice: still hanging, improbably, beneath the bridge, long after the shards around it had melted.

In that moment, he says, “I understood that it was not the warmth of the sun that was melting the ice on the ground. It was direct sunlight.”

What Wangchuck saw reflected in the ice that day was realised four years ago, when he unveiled his first “ice stupa”, an artificial glacier that towered surreally over the otherwise arid landscape, and for which in December he received a prestigious £80,000 innovation prize. ...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/22/the-ice-stupas-of-ladakh-solving-water-crisis-in-the-high-desert-of-himalaya

Image: How the ice pyramids or artificial glaciers work: gravity pressure forces water up through a pipe to form ice stupas that store water for the crop growing season.

[gerontocrat]

It was World Water Day on 22nd March
To mark this UNICEF issued a report...

Yet another instance where collateral damage far outweighs bullets and bombs.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/03/1035171
More children killed by unsafe water, than bullets, says UNICEF chief

UNICEF’s 16-nation study into how water supplies effect children caught up in emergencies, also shows that children under-five are on average more than 20 times more likely to die from illnesses linked to unsafe water and bad sanitation, than from conflict.

“The odds are already stacked against children living through prolonged conflicts – with many unable to reach a safe water source,” said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore. “The reality is that there are more children who die from lack of access to safe water than by bullets."

According to the report, every year, 85,700 children under-15 die from diarrhoea linked to unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene facilities (WASH), compared with 30,900 from conflict.

Some 72,000 under-fives die annually from similar illnesses linked to WASH-access problems, compared to 3,400 from war-related violence.

UNICEF studied data from Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Myanmar, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

It compared World Health Organization (WHO) mortality estimates for “collective violence” and “diarrhoeal disease”.

On average, mortality estimates were higher for diarrhoeal disease than violence in under 15-year-olds – except in Libya, Iraq and Syria.

Under-fives were more likely to die from diarrhoeal disease in all countries except Libya and Syria, the UN report found.

The UNICEF report is at ...
https://weshare.unicef.org/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=2AMZIF3HHUU0&POPUPPN=1&POPUPIID=2AMZIF3JFETA&PN=1&IID=2AMZIF3JFETA

N.B. UN stuff often attacked by hackers. Make sure your virus wall is OK before downloading.

[morganism]

A Rose Inspires Smart Way to Collect and Purify Water

Solar thermal desalination and purification by steam, no electricity required.

https://news.utexas.edu/2019/05/29/a-rose-inspires-smart-way-to-collect-and-purify-water/


https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adma.201900720

“We were searching for more efficient ways to apply the solar-steaming technique for water production by using black filtered paper coated with a special type of polymer, known as polypyrrole,” Fan said.

Polypyrrole is a material known for its photothermal properties, meaning it’s particularly good at converting solar light into thermal heat.

The device removes any contamination from heavy metals and bacteria, and it removes salt from seawater, producing clean water that meets drinking standard requirements set by the World Health Organization.

[morganism]

add:

nanoparticles in water also create steam on exposure to sunlight

Solar Vapor Generation Enabled by Nanoparticles

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn304948h

"Solar illumination of broadly absorbing metal or carbon nanoparticles dispersed in a liquid produces vapor without the requirement of heating the fluid volume. When particles are dispersed in water at ambient temperature, energy is directed primarily to vaporization of water into steam, with a much smaller fraction resulting in heating of the fluid. Sunlight-illuminated particles can also drive H2O–ethanol distillation, yielding fractions significantly richer in ethanol content than simple thermal distillation."

[bligh8]

https://www.wired.com/story/desalination-is-booming-as-cities-run-out-of-water/
Desalination Is Booming as Cities Run out of Water

"Some 30 miles north of San Diego, along the Pacific Coast, sits the Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant, the largest effort to turn salt water into fresh water in North America.
Each day 100 million gallons of seawater are pushed through semi-permeable membranes to create 50 million gallons of water that is piped to municipal users. Carlsbad, which became fully operational in 2015, creates about 10 percent of the fresh water the 3.1 million people in the region use, at about twice the cost of the other main source of water."

"A second plant, similar to Carlsbad, is being built in Huntington, California with the same 50-million-gallon-a-day capability. Currently there are 11 desalination plants in California, and 10 more are proposed.'

"Meanwhile, the cost of desalinated water has been coming down as the technology evolves and the cost of other sources increases. In the last three decades, the cost of desalination has dropped by more than half.
A boom in desal, though, doesn’t mean that everywhere with access to the sea has found a new source of fresh water. Circumstances play a large role. “As populations increase and existing surface water supplies are being tapped out or groundwater is depleted or polluted, then the problems are acute and there are choices to be made” about desal, said Michael Kiparsky of the Wheeler Water Institute at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “There are places around the world where desal makes economic sense, where there is high pressure on the water resources plus a lot of available energy resources,” such as the Middle East.

more within the article

[DrTskoul]

add:

nanoparticles in water also create steam on exposure to sunlight

Solar Vapor Generation Enabled by Nanoparticles

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn304948h

"Solar illumination of broadly absorbing metal or carbon nanoparticles dispersed in a liquid produces vapor without the requirement of heating the fluid volume. When particles are dispersed in water at ambient temperature, energy is directed primarily to vaporization of water into steam, with a much smaller fraction resulting in heating of the fluid. Sunlight-illuminated particles can also drive H2O–ethanol distillation, yielding fractions significantly richer in ethanol content than simple thermal distillation."

So the steam does not condense back on to the liquid and escapes as vapor without heat interaction.... yeah... best if they apply it as solar film evaporator where there is a direct escape route !! However a solar frensel trough steam is much better ( higher temperature therefore higher pressure)

[kassy]

Another winning technology (this is a quote from the article bligh8 posted) :

There are ecological impacts as well. It takes two gallons of sea water to make a gallon of fresh water, which means the gallon left behind is briny. It is disposed of by returning it to the ocean and—if not done properly by diffusing it over large areas—can deplete the ocean of oxygen and have negative impacts on sea life.

A study by the UN Institute for Water, Environment and Health published earlier this year contends that the problem of brine waste has been underestimated by 50 percent and that, when mixed with the chemicals meant to keep systems from fouling, the brine is toxic and causes serious pollution.

Another problem comes from the sucking in of sea water for processing. When a fish or other large organism gets stuck on the intake screen, it dies or is injured; in addition, fish larvae, eggs and plankton get sucked into the system and are killed.

[bligh8]

Kassy

The brine is a big problem with these de-sal plants.  I had one on "Horizon" my sailing vessel, it produced 1 to 2.3 fresh to brine.  Luckily I plumbed it in correctly with the brine exiting the vessel while cycling.  I quit using it not because it was energy intensive (it was) but because of the noise the clunk...clunk...clunk. It interfered with the natural backdrop of the vessels noise the wind and water.

I guess in some areas of the planet there are just no other sources of clean water.

bligh

[vox_mundi]

More Basra Water Crises Unless Iraq Govt Fxes 'Failures': HRW
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/07/22/iraq-water-crisis-basra
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-basra-crises-iraq-govt-failures.html

Nearly 120,000 people were hospitalised last summer after drinking polluted water, in a mass health crisis that sparked deadly protests against the dire state of public services.

In a damning report, HRW found the generally poor state of water quality was likely compounded by algae that rapidly spread last year in the Shatt al-Arab waterway that runs through Basra and provides it with its primary water source.

It indicated that the algae, pollution and high salination could together have sparked the mass health crisis.

HRW slammed Iraqi officials as "short-sighted", saying they had not properly communicated with citizens about the emergency at the time, nor released the results of probes in the year since or dealt with underlying causes.

"What our research brought out very clearly is that the crisis in Basra has not ended," said Belkis Wille, HRW's senior Iraq researcher.

She told AFP that officials had an obligation to communicate to all Iraqi citizens about the state of their drinking water.

... The report relies on dozens of interviews with residents of Basra, experts and government officials as well as analysis of satellite imagery.

Those images revealed evidence of oil spills and algal bloom in the Shatt el-Arab and other waterways that contaminated the water which, when consumed, could cause abdominal pain, fever, vomiting and bloody diarrhoea.

Besides the direct health impact, the water crisis forced families to flee Basra in search of potable water, buy expensive bottled water or keep their children at home if there was no plumbing in schools.

With increasingly scarce water, climate change, pollution and poor water usage, "Basra will suffer from acute water crises in coming years in the absence of strategic solutions", HRW warned.

... Jaafar Sabah, a farmer from Abu al-Khasib, a poor town to the southeast of Basra, told Human Rights Watch:

Each year I was getting 50 percent of the yield of the year before, and then in 2018, almost nothing survived. In 2018, the salinity level in the water was so high that I could grab the salt from the water with my own hands. I am dying of thirst and so are my children. There were four cases of poisoning in my family. I have no money and I cannot take them to the hospital. Where do I get the money from?

https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/07/22/basra-thirsty/iraqs-failure-manage-water-crisis


Satellite imagery shows what appears to be a likely oil spill into the Shatt al-Arab near the Nahr Bin Umar oil and gas field, a site run by the Basra Oil Company (BOC), a governmental oil company, about 25 kilometers upstream from Basra city. The spill apparently lasted for at least 10 days. Satellite image date July 15, 2018. © Planet Labs 2019.

[vox_mundi]

Too-Cheap-to-Notice Water is Coming to an End, and Water Utilities Must Warn Consumers
https://techxplore.com/news/2019-08-too-cheap-to-notice-consumers.html

Too-cheap-to-notice water and sewer bills are disappearing, and water utilities will need to educate consumers on the true cost of their product much like electricity utilities did in the 1970s, according to new research coauthored by a Rutgers University–Camden finance scholar.

The article—"Electricity in the 1970s, Water in the 2020s," which appears in The Electricity Journal—encourages water utilities to invest in the research necessary to provide consumers with data on water rates and usage.

"America's water utility industry is in a capacity crisis due to a history of inadequate investment that will last for years," explains coauthor Richard Michelfelder, a clinical associate professor of finance at Rutgers University–Camden. "The industry has no choice but to invest in large capacity additions in order to meet our surging national demand for water which, in turn, will result in substantial rate increases for the consumer."

When that happens, "rate shock" will set in, followed by a public demand for utilities to justify rates by customer class and conduct a load study that is used to allocate accelerating water (and wastewater treatment) costs by customer class (such as residential or commercial) to determine who should pay for the rapidly rising expenses.

"The processes currently in place to justify cost allocations simply aren't going to be acceptable when the dollars at stake surge," says Michelfelder. "In such a situation, it wouldn't be surprising for a utility to be obliged to conduct a load study to gauge the impact of the rate shock. And the utility will be required to pick up the cost of that study."

[nanning]

  'I don't know how we come back from this': Australia's big dry sucks life from once-proud towns

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/14/i-dont-know-how-we-come-back-from-this-australias-big-dry-sucks-life-from-once-proud-towns
  by Anne Davies, Ben Smee and Lorena Allam


 Quotes:
Australia is experiencing one of its most severe droughts on record, resulting in desperate water shortages across large parts of New South Wales and southern Queensland. Dams in some parts of western NSW have all but dried up, with rainfall levels through the winter in the lowest 10% of historical records in some areas.

The crisis in the far west of the state became unavoidable after the mass fish kills along the lower Darling River last summer, but now much bigger towns closer to the coast, including Dubbo, are also running out of water.

Residents of three distinct areas talked to Guardian Australia about the state of their towns under extreme stress from water shortages, expressing anxiety about their future but also determination to keep communities alive.


“Ah, but it will be all right. We’ve got through this before.”

Macdonald says he was called “a communist” by a local Warwick identity for suggesting the weather patterns had changed and that October thunderstorms were no longer a regular occurrence.

“I’d be too frightened to talk about [climate change] in this town,” he says. “It doesn’t get through to people at all. Not one bit.”


Warwick is on track to run out of water within months. Roadside signs heading into town remind residents of the new restrictions: 100 litres per person, per day.

[wili]

Thanks for this.

More proof that, for some people, no amount of evidence, even 'evidence' that destroys their lives and their towns, will convince some people to discard a cherished ideology.

If devastating droughts don't change their minds, I really doubt a Blue Ocean Event will.

[vox_mundi]

Water May Be Scarce for New Power Plants in Asia
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-scarce-power-asia.html

Climate change and over-tapped waterways could leave developing parts of Asia without enough water to cool power plants in the near future, new research indicates.

The study found that existing and planned power plants that burn coal for energy could be vulnerable.

That is already a problem for some power plants in the United States, and this study suggests, it is likely to be an even greater problem in developing parts of Asia—Mongolia, Southeast Asia and parts of India and China—where more than 400 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plant capacity are planned for operation by 2030. (By comparison: The largest coal-fired power plant in Ohio has the capacity to produce about 2,600 megawatts of electricity; the new plants planned for developing Asia are the equivalent of more than 150 similar facilities.)

That increasing power production will itself be part of the problem, the researchers found, creating greater demand for water at the same time that climate change significantly limits the supply.

The researchers analyzed databases of existing and planned coal-fired power plants, and combined that information with high-resolution hydrological maps to evaluate the possible strain on water supplies throughout the region. Then they applied different climate scenarios—increases in global temperature of 1.5, 2 and 3 degrees Celsius (2.7—4.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, increases set out as milestones in the Paris Agreement, a 2016 international accord to address climate change.

The researchers then considered different cooling systems and potential use of post-combustion CO2 capture equipment, and the water that might be needed to run them.

... "The numbers showed that there simply would not be enough water to cool all the power plants, but there is also a lot of local variability"

Open Access: Yaoping Wang et al, Vulnerability of existing and planned coal-fired power plants in Developing Asia to changes in climate and water resources, Energy & Environmental Science (2019).

[vox_mundi]

Zimbabwe's Capital Runs Dry as Taps Cut Off for 2 Million People
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-zimbabwe-capital-2m-people.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-zimbabwe-water/zimbabwe-capital-city-shuts-main-water-plant-shortages-loom-idUSKBN1W82PH



The more than 2 million residents of Zimbabwe's capital and surrounding towns are now without water after authorities shut down the city's main treatment plant, raising new fears about disease after a recent cholera outbreak while the economy crumbles further.

Officials in Harare have struggled to raise foreign currency to import water treatment chemicals; about $2.7 million is needed per month. Meanwhile, water levels in polluted dams are dropping because of drought.

"Everyone living in Harare is affected, they don't have water," City Council spokesman Michael Chideme said Tuesday, as residents turned to options such as bottled water or wells.

Chideme called it a dangerous situation because of the risk of water-borne diseases. "Maybe the situation will be resolved by tomorrow but we are not sure," he said.

The capital now frequently records cases of diseases such as typhoid due to water shortages and dilapidated sewer infrastructure. Some residents are forced to get water from shallow, unsafe wells and defecate in the open.

The Associated Press earlier this month watched some residents pump water then wait a half-hour for enough water to seep into the well to pump again.



------------------------

Elsewhere ...

Gas Shortages Paralyze Haiti, Triggering Protests Against Failing Economy and Dysfunctional Politics
http://theconversation.com/gas-shortages-paralyze-haiti-triggering-protests-against-failing-economy-and-dysfunctional-politics-116337

... In Haiti’s Cap Haitian region and rural northeast, the humanitarian situation is dire. For over a year, a severe drought has left people with hardly any access to water. Crops have shriveled and the Dominican Republic just closed its border with Haiti, so food that once came from there is in short supply.

... Haiti’s financial struggles are also, in large part, the result of an ill-conceived economic system that has failed to meet Haiti’s needs for over a century.

Ever since the American military occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, its economic and social policies have been designed to attract foreign investment. The plan, which was crafted in the 1910s and 1920s by the U.S. military government, was to “develop” this rural Caribbean country by making it an appealing operating environment for U.S. firms.

In practice, that meant keeping Haitian wages, corporate taxes and tariffs low. In exchange, the theory went, foreign investment would bring infrastructure development and jobs, benefiting all Haitians.

American agro-corporations began profitably cultivating cash crops like coffee, bananas and sugar in Haiti in the early 20th century.

In 1926, American businessmen backed by the American military government seized more than 12,000 acres of fertile land from Haitian peasants in the Cap Haitian region to grow sisal, a fibrous plant used in weaving. To make room for this massive industrial operation, thousands of families were evicted from their land.

The intensive cultivation of just one crop over two decades so depleted the soil that food production across Cap Haitian was threatened.

This process of exploitation followed by scarcity and environmental degradation has repeated itself for decades.

Chasing low-wage labor and free trade, U.S. corporations and military agencies have established sugar cane plantations, rubber plantations and textile factories in Haiti for the past 100 years, with similarly disappointing results for workers and the environment. ...

[vox_mundi]

Half of Piedmont Drinking Wells May Exceed North Carolina's Hexavalent Chromium Standards
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-piedmont-wells-nc-hexavalent-chromium.html



A new study which combines measurements from nearly 1,400 drinking water wells across North Carolina estimates that more than half of the wells in the state's central region contain levels of cancer-causing hexavalent chromium in excess of state safety standards.

Only a single North Carolina well in the study violated the maximum contaminant level for total chromium set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of 100 micrograms per liter. But the NC Department of Health and Human Service's much lower health advisory level—0.07 micrograms per liter—is set to protect against a one-in-one-million risk of cancer over a 70-year life span. That level of hexavalent chromium was exceeded by 470 of the 865 wells for which the contaminant was measured.

"There is a huge gap between 100 and 0.07 micrograms per liter," said Rachel Coyte, a doctoral student in Vengosh's lab who was lead author on the study. "If you follow the EPA guidance, we have no problem. But if you look at the NC health recommendations, there is a significant population exposed to hexavalent chromium concentrations at or exceeding a one-in-one-million lifetime risk of cancer. Why is this gap not being addressed?"



Statewide, nearly 4 million people rely on groundwater as their primary source of drinking water. "The areas where we see the largest number of groundwater users, like Wake and Mecklenburg Counties, coincide with some of the highest probabilities for the occurrence of hexavalent chromium above the health advisory level," Coyte said.

Rachel M. Coyte et al, Occurrence and distribution of hexavalent chromium in groundwater from North Carolina, USA, Science of The Total Environment (2019)

[vox_mundi]

‘It Tastes Like Clay’: Residents of Rio Alarmed by Murky, Smelly Tap water
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/16/brazil-rio-de-janeiro-tap-water-pollution

Just weeks before hosting its world famous carnival – and with summer temperatures soaring past 40C (104F) – Rio de Janeiro is on edge as residents across the city complain of murky and foul-smelling tap water.

Scores of neighbourhoods in the city of 6.7 million people, as well as six nearby towns, have been affected by the crisis, which has dragged on for nearly two weeks.

Social media feeds have been flooded with photos and videos of clay-coloured water, while supplies of bottled water have run low.

The city’s publicly-owned water company has said the strange taste was caused by an organic compound called geosmin (which is found naturally in soil), and insisted the water was safe to drink.

But residents have complained of falling sick after drinking the water, and environmentalists blamed the crisis on polluted rivers, a lack of basic sanitation and decades of mismanagement.



The water crisis in Rio de Janeiro is totally connected to the environmental collapse we are experiencing. The rush to buy drinking water to the point of running out of stock in some stores is a preview of what we can experience in the not-so-distant future.

https://twitter.com/milensbatista/status/1216020403958829057?s=20

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Main Water Sources that Supply Rio de Janeiro are Polluted, Expert warning
https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2020/01/09/principais-mananciais-de-agua-que-abastecem-o-rio-de-janeiro-estao-poluidos-alerta-especialista.ghtml

"If the raw water is more and more polluted, it will reach a point that you will not be able to treat," said Uerj's sanitary engineer. Aerial images show the problem.

[gerontocrat]

Meanwhile in the UK, home to world-class(?) Water Companies.....

Note that London & the SE do have a permanently looming water resource problem.

Hackney Council criticise Thames Water over repeated floods

Thames Water has been criticised by Hackney Council after burst water pipes have repeatedly flooded north London. A 36-inch (91cm) mains pipe burst in Finsbury Park in October 2019, damaging 177 homes and leaving thousands without water.

It was the third major flood in the area in three years.

"It is extremely lucky no-one was killed or seriously injured," said councillor Sharon Patrick, living in Hackney scrutiny commission chair.

Following the Lea Bridge flood in 2018 Thames Water ignored offers to co-operate with the council in training for future emergencies, the Local Democracy Reporter Service reported.

https://weownit.org.uk/company/thames-water

Thames Water is owned by a series of investment companies, many of them sovereign wealth funds or pension funds owned and run by foreign governments. Thames Water's 2017 annual report in fact shows that the company is over 50% owned by foreign states through pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.

UK's biggest water provider, supplying water and sewerage services to 15 million people in London and the Thames Valley and serve over one quarter of the UK's population. Thames Water has been criticised for financialising one of Britain's key utilities, prioritising shareholder dividends and operating with a high level of debt. A Financial Times investigation revealed that Thames Water paid no corporation tax between 2011-15.

They also lose 677.2 million litres of water per day through old and leaky pipes - more than any other water company!

Shareholders benefit from this scandal to the tune of £392 million in profits between 2013-2017.

In 2018, Thames Water's highest paid director received £851,000 in salary, bonuses and other perks.

[kassy]

One of those examples of legalized theft which should piss people of.

[TerryM]

^^
Ramen!!


Terry

[nanning]

   ‘It tastes like clay’: residents of Rio alarmed by murky, smelly tap water

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/16/brazil-rio-de-janeiro-tap-water-pollution
  by Dom Phillips


  Excerpts:
Just weeks before hosting its world famous carnival – and with summer temperatures soaring past 40C (104F) – Rio de Janeiro is on edge as residents across the city complain of murky and foul-smelling tap water.

Scores of neighbourhoods in the city of 6.7 million people, as well as six nearby towns, have been affected by the crisis, which has dragged on for nearly two weeks.

Social media feeds have been flooded with photos and videos of clay-coloured water, while supplies of bottled water have run low.

The city’s publicly-owned water company has said the strange taste was caused by an organic compound called geosmin (which is found naturally in soil), and insisted the water was safe to drink.

But residents have complained of falling sick after drinking the water, and environmentalists blamed the crisis on polluted rivers, a lack of basic sanitation and decades of mismanagement.


Emily dos Santos, 20, who works for an arts NGO, fell sick after drinking filtered tap water. “I had a fever and diarrhoea; I vomited a lot for three days,” she said. “The doctor said it was bacteria in the water – and that lots of other people had come in with the same symptoms.”

Cleaning up the city’s water and sewage was supposed to be part of its legacy for hosting the 2016 Olympics, but never happened.


Cellphone technician Kamilla dos Santos, 28, who lives in Rio’s north zone, was sick for five days. “You can’t drink the water; it tastes awful – like clay – and it has a terrible smell,” she said.

And the three rivers that supply the Guandu treatment centre, he said, are essentially “sewage gullies”.

The crisis was “the sum of all the mistakes made in the last 50 years”, he said, noting that favelas lacking basic sanitation have grown up on rivers and blaming “uncontrolled urban expansion and lack of investment in basic sanitation”.

[vox_mundi]

Engineers Create 'Smart' Aerogel That Turns Air Into Drinking Water
https://phys.org/news/2021-01-smart-aerogel-air.html

Some say future wars will be fought over water, and a billion people around the world are already struggling to find enough water to live. Now, researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have created a substance that extracts water from air without any external power source.

To extract water from air, a team led by Professor Ho Ghim Wei from the NUS Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering created a type of aerogel, a solid material that weighs almost nothing. Under the microscope, it looks like a sponge, but it does not have to be squeezed to release the water it absorbs from the air. It also does not need a battery. In a humid environment, one kilogram of it will produce 17 liters of water a day.



The aerogel autonomously gathers water molecules from the air, condenses them into a liquid and releases the water. When there is sunshine, the structure can further boost the water release by transitioning to a complete water-hating state. And it is very good at that. 95 percent of the water vapor that goes into the aerogel comes out as water. In laboratory tests, the aerogel gave water non-stop for months.

The researchers tested the water, and found that it met World Health Organization's standards for drinking water.

"Given that atmospheric water is continuously replenished by the global hydrological cycle, our invention offers a promising solution for achieving sustainable freshwater production in a variety of climatic conditions, at minimal energy cost," said Professor Ho



G. Yilmaz et al. Autonomous atmospheric water seeping MOF matrix, Science Advances (2020).
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/42/eabc8605

[Bruce Steele]

Vox , If enough of this gel were placed high on a mountain you could produce energy from hydropower.
Close to a perpetual motion machine.
Harvest of water vapor will of course leave someone’s air drier downstream/ downwind. For an environment like Coastal Southern Calif. nighttime fog may turn into a water resource but a lowered air moisture content might prove detrimental to native flora. That is I don’t believe in free lunches.
 Our Southern Calif. water season has delivered less than two inches so far this year although some rains are forecast for the weekend. If we can change fog into water it will be a large temptation to do so no matter the consequences to native plant life and dependent fauna.

[interstitial]

Certain plants are supposed to be pretty good at doing the same thing. I don't know how they compare but plants sound like a better idea.

[vox_mundi]

Cloud Catchers of Peru
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200221-how-fog-can-solve-water-shortage-from-climate-change-in-peru

[vox_mundi]

Irrigation Schemes In Sub-Saharan Africa Consistently Falling Short of Their Promises
https://phys.org/news/2021-01-irrigation-schemes-sub-saharan-africa-falling.html

Large-scale irrigation infrastructure projects are back on the development agenda in sub-Saharan Africa after a near 30-year hiatus, despite projects having had disappointing results, with social and environmental side effects outweighing benefits. Such projects are planned in response to water scarcity pressures and are seen as a solution to intensify agricultural production, support rural economic development and enhance resilience to climate change.

New research, published in Nature Sustainability, from a University of Manchester-led consortium quantified the performance of 79 African irrigation schemes. They did this by comparing planning documents to satellite-derived land cover maps to give the percentage of irrigation delivered and those that had stopped working. The found schemes are consistently underperforming and there have been no trends in project.

The schemes delivered a median of 16% of the proposed area. Sixteen out of 79 were completely broken. 20 schemes delivered over 80% of the proposed area.

The University of Manchester led team argues that it is the political and management frameworks underpinning African irrigation development leading to the underperformance. The financial viability of schemes are limited by low value crops that are promoted for increased grain production and national food security. Secondly, proposals are unrealistic to start with: planning is afflicted with optimism bias and political requirements for on-paper profitable projects. And finally, schemes are managed by centralized bureaucracies, lacking technical expertise, local knowledge or financial resources to ensure long-term maintenance.

... "Irrigation schemes have been constructed in sub-Saharan Africa for nearly 100 years, our research shows planners have consistently over-promised how much land can be developed and failed to achieve this. Future plans should be mindful of issues faced by previous schemes to avoid repeating the same mistakes."

Thomas P. Higginbottom et al. Performance of large-scale irrigation projects in sub-Saharan Africa, Nature Sustainability (2021)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00670-7

[Sigmetnow]

Florida, U.S.
Hacker increased chemical level at Oldsmar's city water system, sheriff says
Thanks to a vigilant operator and several redundancies, officials say the heightened level of sodium hydroxide never caused a public threat.
https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/local/pinellascounty/pinellas-oldsmar-water-system-computer-intrustion/67-512b2bab-9f94-44d7-841e-5169fdb0a0bd

[vox_mundi]

Humans Control Majority of Freshwater Ebb and Flow On Earth, Study Finds
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-humans-ups-downs-freshwater-storage.html


Proportion of seasonal surface water storage variability associated with reservoirs by hydrologic basin from Oct 2018 to July 2020. Darker colors represent higher influence of human-managed reservoirs on surface water storage and lighter colors represent less influence.

Humans have made a remarkable impact on the planet, from clearing forests for agriculture and urbanization to altering the chemistry of the atmosphere with fossil fuels. Now, a new study in the journal Nature reveals for the first time the extent of human impact on the global water cycle.

The study used NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2) to assemble the largest ever dataset of seasonal water levels in more than 227,000 lakes, ponds and reservoirs worldwide. The data reveal that even though human-managed reservoirs comprise only a small percentage of all water bodies, they account for 57% of the total seasonal water storage changes globally.

"We tend to think of the water cycle as a purely natural system: Rain and snowmelt run into rivers, which run to the ocean where evaporation starts the whole cycle again," said Sarah Cooley, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University who launched the research project while a graduate student at Brown University. "But humans are actually intervening substantially in that cycle. Our work demonstrates that humans are responsible for a majority of the seasonal surface water storage variability on Earth."

From October 2018 to July 2020, the satellite measured water levels in 227,386 bodies of water, ranging in size from the American Great Lakes to ponds with areas less than one tenth of a square mile. Each water body was observed at different times of year to track changes in water levels. The researchers cross-referenced the water bodies they observed with a database of reservoirs worldwide to identify which water bodies were human-controlled and which were natural.

While countries like the U.S. and Canada gauge reservoir levels and make that information publicly available, many countries don't publish such data. And very few non-reservoir lakes and ponds are gauged at all. So there was no way to do this analysis without the precise satellite observations, the researchers said.

The study found that while natural lakes and ponds varied seasonally by an average of .22 meters, human-managed reservoirs varied by .86 meters. Added together, the much larger variation in reservoirs compared to natural lakes means that reservoirs account for 57% of the total variation. In some places, however, human influence was even stronger than that. For example, in arid regions like the Middle East, American West, India and Southern Africa, variability attributed to human control surges to 90% and above.

In a separate study published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, the research team was able to use ICESat-2 data to shed light on how reservoir water is being used. The study showed that in places like the Middle East, reservoir levels tend to be lower in summer and higher in the winter. That suggests that water is being released in the dry season for irrigation and drinking water. In contrast, the trend in places like Scandinavia was the opposite. There, water is released in the winter to make hydroelectric power for heating.



Human alteration of global surface water storage variability, Nature (2021).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03262-3