WATER RESOURCES

Availability, Usage and Pollution

Usage

• World = 700 m3/year average per capita use• N. America = 1850 m3/year average per capita

use

• Value very low and transportation expensive• Source needs to be close to consumption• Building canals and aqueducts expensive

Surface Water Streams, rivers, lakes: accessible, cheap, easy extractionQuantity related to: • Climate (amount and timing of precipitation)• Geology (porosity and permeability of ground) • Biology (trees, plants, grazing animals) • Geography (topography) conditions.• Politics• People settle on flood plains for fertile soils, available

water for irrigation, transport and waste disposal• Settlement changes the flow processes of the river

causes increased flooding and pollution from industry, farming, sewage and domestic waste

GROUND WATER

• Source is infiltration from precipitation, lakes, streams, reservoirs

• Recharge time from days to millions of years• Issues relate to pollution, ground subsidence

and excessive extraction especially when aquifer crosses national boundaries

• Surface and Groundwater quantity and quality are closely linked

Desalination• Desalination of sea water by evaporation or osmosis

– sea water: 3.5% salt– drinking water standards: 0.05 % salt

• Very expensive: 10 x cost of other water supplies• Large scale evaporation plant requires energy to boil water

so often combined with a power plant• California: emergency supplies in time of drought.• Mexico: holiday resorts for foreigners • Middle East: desalination of brackish ground water which

contains 0.5% salt• Jebel Ali desalination and power plant in Dubai will be the largest in the world.It solves water shortage but discharge of hot water may damage largest coral reefin the Arabian Gulf

Water Shortage

• The world's supply of fresh water is running out. Already one person in five has no access to safe drinking water.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/world/2000/world_water_crisis

USA: ORME, Tennessee. (© 2007 The Associated Press)

• At twilight, the Mayor of Orme releases the community tank's water supply.suddenly washing machines whir, kitchen sinks fill and showers run.

• Three hours later, he returns and reverse the process, cutting off water to the town's 145 residents.

• The severe drought across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. At Orme, 150 miles NW of Atlanta, the water has run out.

• The waterfall that fed the mountain hamlet has been reduced to a trickle, and the creek running through the center of town is dry.

• Three days a week, two volunteer fire trucks haul about 20,000 gallons of water from the hydrant to Orme's tank.

• Orme can survive as it has only 145 people.

• Atlanta has 4.5 million people and only a few weeks of water left

CANADA: Hotels, other businesses closing as water shortage hits Tofino, BC:

CBC Tuesday, August 29, 2006

• There's a severe water shortage in Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island, generally one of the wettest communities in B.C.

• The municipality issued a public notice for all hotels, restaurants and other food services to shut down by Friday to preserve what water supply remains.

• All commercial water users including fish plants are not to use any water.

• The district's main reservoir is very low because of the dry summer. The residential water supply is being maintained with water from a creek. As a result, people are being asked to boil their water.

• the tourist industry will take a big hit on the eve of one of the busiest weekends of the year."For people in the restaurant industry, you can't wash your dishes. You can't clean any of the linens if you're in a hotel business. You can't wash your hands. Your clients can't take a shower and there's no other water source The growth in tourism has been "fantastic," but all the development has put a severe strain on the water resources.

• Officials have said the order will stay in effect at least until there is significant rainfall.

• Local hotel owners came together and trucked water from Ucluelet to save the Labor Day weekend tourist trade

Europe: CATALONIA

• More than half of Europe's cities are exploiting groundwater at unsustainable rates.

• Chronic water shortages are already affecting 4.5m people in Catalonia, where authorities are pressing for the construction of a pipeline to divert water from the Rhone in France to Barcelona.

Mexico City: Subsidence and pollution

Mexico city is sinking because of the amount of water being pumped out from beneath its foundations.

One of the largest and most populous cities in the world, it was once a lush land of lakes. But over the last 500 years the lakes have been drained and the surrounding forests chopped down. As the city grew in size, the water problem magnified.

With no adequate drainage system, today rainwater mixes with sewage and is used for irrigation. The city is now at serious risk of running out of clean water.

An estimated 40% of the city's water is lost through leaky pipes built at the turn of the century.

Middle East Conflict• Water is the most precious resource in the Middle East, more important than oil. • There are four main drainage basins but each river crosses at least one

international boundary• Euphrates: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait• Tigris: Iraq, Kuwait• Jordan: Jordan, Syria, Israel, Lebanon• Orontes: Turkey, Syria• Centuries of negotiations, treaties, discussions • As populations increase, water becomes more scarce, aggravating regional

tensions. e.g.

• Turkey has been accused by Syria and Iraq of depriving them of much-needed water, as it continues to build a series of dams along the Euphrates and Tigris.

• Competition for water from the River Jordan was a major cause of the 1967 war. • Israelis in the West Bank use four times as much water as their Palestinian

neighbors.

• The Lebanese have accused Israel of having designs on the waters of the River Litani, and Syria accuses it of being reluctant to withdraw from the banks of the Sea of Galilee, the source of up to 30% of Israel's water.

Africa• A United Nations report predicts that access to water may be the single biggest cause of

conflict and war in Africa in the next 25 years. Such wars are most likely to be in countries where rivers or lakes are shared by more than one country.

• Ghana, has become totally reliant on the hydro-electric output of the Akosombo dam on the river Volta.

• Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world, is dependent on the river Niger, which flows from Guinea through Mali to Nigeria, for food, water and transport. But great stretches of the river are now facing environmental catastrophe as a result of pollution.

• In Nigeria, half the population has no access to clean water, and as in much of Africa, many women walk for hours a day to fetch it.

• The Nile There is already fierce national competition over water for irrigation and power generation in the Nile river basin.

• Cairo warned in 1991 that it was ready to use force to protect its access to waters of the Nile, which also runs through Ethiopia and Sudan. If the populations of these countries continue to rise, competition for the water could be fierce.

•  Zambezi River Basin in southern Africa is one of the most overused river systems in the world.

• Although the countries through which the river flows usually vie with each other to harness the water power, at other times they are deluged by floods and heavy rain.

• The region experienced the worst floods in living memory in March 2000, exacerbated by Zimbabwe opening the Kariba dam gates.

India

•  THE GANGES The most sacred Hindu river, the Ganges, is so depleted that the Sundarban wetlands and mangrove forests of Bangladesh are seriously threatened.

• It is also said to contain unacceptable levels of arsenic. • As more trees are chopped down, and more buildings

erected along its banks, the glaciers supplying the river have been melting, raising fears of shortages and drought downstream.

• The river has been the subject of a long-running dispute between India and Bangladesh, although recently progress has been made in resolving the conflict.

Australia: the world's driest continent

A scheme to reverse the flow of the Snowy River has backfired disastrously, threatening to deprive Adelaide of fresh water.

• The region that the diverted Snowy River now feeds is bounded by Australia's two longest rivers, the Murray and the Darling.

• The water tables under this land are now rising, pushing deadly quantities of salt to the surface.

• The salt has already destroyed some of the country's most productive farmland.

• The Murray-Darling basin produces three-quarters of Australia's irrigated crops.

• Many of the basin's tributaries may be unusable for irrigation in 20 years time, let alone as a source of drinking water.

Northern China

• All three rivers feeding China's Northern Plain are severely polluted, damaging health and limiting irrigation.

• The lower reaches of the Yellow river, which feeds China's most important farming region, ran dry for 226 days in 1997.

• Northern China is home to two thirds of the country's cropland but only one fifth of its water.

• As competing demands for water are made by cities, industry and agriculture, the land is drying up.

• Between 1991 and 1996, the water table beneath the north China plain fell by an average of 1.5 m/year.

Vanishing Aral Sea • The Aral Sea in Central Asia was once the

world's fourth biggest inland sea, and one of the world's most fertile regions.

• But economic mismanagement has turned the area into a toxic desert.

• The two rivers feeding the sea, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, were diverted in a Soviet scheme to grow cotton in the desert.

• Between 1962 and 1994, the level of the Aral Sea fell by 16 metres. • Rich delta ecosystems were largely lost. • Rusted ships stranded on the desiccated seabed and ghost fishing villages

are a sad reminder of the once thriving fishing industry. • The surrounding region now has one of the highest infant mortality in the

world, and anaemia and cancers caused by chemicals blowing off the dried sea bed are common.

• Water control structures on both the Aral Sea and Syr Darya River had either generated only temporary benefits or failed altogether.

Aral Sea Solution

• The World Bank helped build the 8 mile Kok-Aral Dam in 2005, which separates the two parts of the Sea.

• This will allow the accumulation of over 29 km3 water in the Northern Aral Sea or Small Sea and help to restore delta and river wetland ecosystems.

• A sluice in the dike is periodically opened, allowing water to flow into the largely dried-up Southern Aral Sea.

• Waterworks will raise the water supply for irrigation and restore fishing lakes in the delta area, for hatcheries to restock the Northern Aral Sea’s fish population.

• There is a reduction in diseases due to unhealthy drinking water.• In a few years, the salt content in the Sea is expected to decline from a

current 23 to 10 g/L (1960 levels). • The desertification of surrounding land is being mitigated• Already, in Tastubek, a fishing village near the Small Sea, residents

are able to catch salt-resistant flounder introduced in the 1970s • As the salt content of the Small Aral drops, many of the 24 fish species

that once supplied a thriving fishery will return. • Work has begun in Uzbekistan, to restore the delta wetlands and lakes• Sustainable results will take 10 years.

Future trends in the use of water

Increased shortage and conflicts especially in hot countries due to:

• Change from small scale agrarian population to large scale irrigated farming and industry

• Increase in population & rise in living standards• Changes in global climate

• Solutions: Value water• International treaties and economic water management• Improve water conservation technologies• Recycle water• Bank water during surplus sell it during drought

WATER POLLUTION• Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD):

– measure of oxygen used by anaerobic bacteria– mg/l of O2 consumed over 5 days at 20oC – increases with organic pollutants

• Organic matter: sewage, chemical &agricultural wasteAerobic bacteria use oxygen to break it down until oxygen exhausted

then anaerobes produce reduced compounds such as H2S, sulphides. Organic spill in stream short lived problem:

time of residence is lowBOD can be reduced by aeration.

• Stagnant water: breeding grounds for pathogenic bacteria

• Eutrophication: Phosphates or nitrates from fertilizers or sewage provide too much nutrition for the plant life Algal blooms cut sunlight to plants below which die, use up oxygen and increase the BOD

WASTE WATER TREATMENT• Organic pollutants: need to lower BOD, reduce

suspended solids, nasty bacteria, and organic compounds

• Sewage Process:(1) Screening of large solids(2) Digesting of solid organic material by anaerobic bacteria to form sludge which may be used as fertilizer after treatment

Methane also produced and saleable (3) Breakdown of soluble organics by aerobic bacteria in aerated system(4) Disinfectant of waste water with Cl(5) Treatment to lower heavy metal content.

TREATMENT OF POLLUTION• SURFACE WATER

Point source: find and stop pollution and waitGeneral source: e.g. leaking sewage systems, not easy to stop, must treat waterAdd air: allow aerobic bacteria work more efficientlyFilter through sand and gravel as bacteria work more efficiently in biofilmsSeparate source of drinking water from polluted waterUse ion exchange methods such as zeolites or clays

• GROUND WATER: Very difficult to clean as residence time of hundreds to thousands of years • Much less accessible than surface water• No oxygen available for aerobic bacteria• Some natural cleansing by passing through sand & gravel•• Map geology and aquifers as most aquifers not studied until problems arise• Identify contaminants and source• Possible remedies:

chlorinate wellpump out contaminated water and treat on surfacevapour extraction to remove volatile contaminants inject bacteria and air into aquiferbuild a permeable treatment bed within aquifer

• Legislation prevent dumping make companies pay for remediation.

• Ban pollutants such as DDT and PCB's