Govt plans to regulate groundwater extraction

New Delhi, Jul 17 (PTI) The government is planning to regulate over-extraction of groundwater for irrigation and industry which is seriously affecting drinking water supply in rural India, Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has said.


He said drinking water security was facing multiple threats including drying up of groundwater sources due to its unregulated over-extraction.
"80 per cent of drinking water supply schemes of rural India are depending on groundwater sources and these sources are drying up due to unregulated over-extraction of water for industry and irrigation," Ramesh told PTI.
"It is a serious issue. We are planning to regulate over-extraction of groundwater for irrigation and industry," the minister said.
Ramesh was given additional charge of the Drinking Water and Sanitation portfolio after Gurudas Kamat refused to take the charge as Minister of State with Independent charge and quit the government.
According to the Ministry, drinking water supply schemes are being affected as perennial water sources are becoming seasonal. They are also getting contaminated by chemical contaminants found in the earth like arsenic and fluoride.
Leaching or fertilisers, untreated industrial effluent and sewage are also threatening the safe and sustainable drinking water.
The goal of the central government''s National Drinking Water Programme is to provide every rural person with safe water for drinking, cooking and other domestic needs on sustainable basis. More >>>

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Dramatic Climate Swings Likely as World Warms: Ancient El Niño Clue to Future Floods

ScienceDaily (July 15, 2011) — Dramatic climate swings behind both last year's Pakistan flooding and this year's Queensland floods in Australia are likely to continue as the world gets warmer, scientists predict.


Researchers at the Universities of Oxford and Leeds have discovered that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the sloshing of the warmest waters on the planet from the West Pacific towards the East Pacific every 2-7 years, continued during Earth's last great warm period, the Pliocene.

Their results suggest that swings between the two climatic extremes, known as El Niño and La Niña, may even have occurred more frequently in the warmer past and may increase in frequency in the future. Extreme ENSO events cause droughts, forest fires and floods across much of the world as well as affecting fishery production.

Reporting in the journal Paleoceanography, the team of geochemists and climate modellers use the Pliocene as a past analogue and predictor of the workings of Earth's future climate. More >>>

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UN Calls For More Water Cooperation In Central Asia

July 12, 2011

The UN says more cooperation among Central Asian states sharing the shores of a key river could be the key to future peace and security in the region.  
In a fresh report, the UN Environmental Program, or UNEP, said the Amu Darya river is being taxed by big hydropower projects upstream and demand for irrigated agriculture downstream, leading to "major natural resource challenges" for Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

The report notes the Aral Sea -- which relies in part from water from the Amu Darya -- has seen water levels drop by 26 meters and the shoreline recede by several hundred kilometers.

It also said pollution from mining, metals, petroleum and chemical activities along the river and air pollution in the form of dust and salt from dried out parts of the Aral Sea are challenges to human health.

"From a security perspective climate change, water, energy and agriculture constitute the main areas of interest for this report as they reveal the potential for increasing instability and even confrontation as more flows are impounded upstream reducing those water availability and quality downstream," said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. more >>>

Political Sustainability and Human Security

Economic Revival Requires a Revival of our National Community


New York - As the nation's debt deadline approaches, and the political and media gamesmanship in our nation's capital increases in intensity, I find myself thinking more and more about community. The value with which we hold each other, and our relationship to those with whom we share our living space. The political parties blame each other for the stubborn persistence of unemployment, now over 9% officially and over 16% when we count those who have given up on the job market or are underemployed.

The Republicans blame the declining economy on over-taxation. The Democrats blame job loss on Republican resistance to additional stimulus. Twice this year the Republicans have been willing to "play chicken" with the President and the nation's well being: first over the budget by threatening a government shutdown, and now by holding the entire economy hostage while threatening to default on our debt. Ideology is dominating debates that should be settled by data, not wishful thinking. People in America need work. Our community has work that needs to be done. It's time to close that loop.

The creation of a global economy and communication network has placed the American economy and our society in uncharted territory. We do not really understand the complex economic, political, ecological, social and cultural forces that drive the world economy. We don't really know the answers to the problems we face. Like FDR during the New Deal we need to pragmatically experiment. We need to learn what works and what doesn't. What collective community responses are needed? What private entrepreneurial forces need to be unleashed? In March of 1933, as FDR assumed the Presidency in the depths of the Great Depression, some of his speeches and articles were collected in a book entitled Looking Forward. At the dawn of the New Deal, Roosevelt wrote:
"The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." Franklin D. Roosevelt, Looking Forward, chapter 2, p. 51 (1933). More >>>

Going forward into this century all states need to have all political parties work together for the benefit of their country and people. To deal with the perfect storm that we are faced with, climate change, sea level rise, energy shortages, and a rapidly rising population it is imperative that political stalemate becomes a thing of the past. Editor

Location: Cayman Islands

Post-doctoral Fellowship in Socio-Hydrology

May be of interest to readers.


Post-doctoral Fellowship in Socio-Hydrology: Defining Water Security in the Saskatchewan River Basin

http://www.usask.ca/water/PDF%20-%20socio-hydrology%206.June.2011.pdf

seanna

--
Phd Candidate
Water Policy and Governance Group
Department of Geography and Environmental Management
University of Waterloo

www.wpgg.org

Location: Cayman Islands

Water security on top of Himalayan agenda

Climate Summit 4 July, 2011 - As a build up to the “Climate Summit for a Living Himalayas 2011,” scheduled for November in Bhutan this year, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal identified a host of issues related to water security for regional cooperation.


This was done at a two-day expert group regional consultative meeting in Bangladesh to develop a 10-year regional roadmap beginning 2012 on water security, which ended yesterday. Water is one of the four thematic issues of the climate summit among food, biodiversity, and energy.

The members identified areas of cooperation, divided into two broad headings - climate change and its impact on regional water resources, and sharing of knowledge and capacity building.

The countries agreed to assess the existing hydro-meteorological network and enhance the data collection process. They will review the climate modelling and select appropriate modelling tools to develop hydrological scenarios at different scales in the region.

The member countries also agreed to enhance ecosystem management practices to minimise the impacts of climate change-induced disasters. They will develop effective approaches and actions concerning disaster management.

Considering irreversible impacts of climate change, the countries agreed to build resilience through conservation of mountain, coastal and wetland ecosystems, while also emphasising the need to promote traditional water conservation techniques backstopped by modern methods to increase the efficiency of water use. Full Article >>>

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Environment: Worlds Of Water

Why water security is one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century, and why water politics have just got more complicated.


Water is the most essential and most awkward of natural resources. It has no substitutes, but many uses - as drinking water, for sanitation purposes, in agriculture, in industrial processes, in electricity generation. Water's versatility makes it coveted by many different consumers, each with their own needs and political heft.

Sometimes water ends up not being water at all: it becomes an input to agricultural production or energy or, in the case of bio-fuels, both. In hydraulic fracturing, water is key to the extraction of natural gas. Elsewhere, it is needed to cool power stations. In southern Mongolia's bone-dry Gobi, water is needed for the region's huge mineral wealth to be developed.

Sometimes, the process works the other way, and huge amounts of energy and wealth are used to provide water. In California, it is the State Water Project, transporting water to southern California, that is the single largest user of electricity. In Saudi Arabia, up to 1.5 million barrels of oil per day are used to desalinate and pump the country's water.

Water's usability depends not only on sheer quantity, but also on quality and type. Water's most common form - ocean saltwater - is its least directly useful (though advocates of large-scale desalinisation and salt-water farming have long promised that could change).

The availability of water in both necessary quantity and quality depends, in part, on geography. Despite the overall global abundance of water, over one billion people live in water-scarce or water stressed parts of the world, a number expected to triple over the next few decades as groundwater depletion, climate change and accelerating demands on water extraction take their toll. Globally, the Water Resources Group has defined a forty percent gap between projected water requirements in 2030 and current accessible and reliable supply. In some places, the gap is much greater.
Full Article >>>

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