Water Woes: Local & Global
Yesterday was World Water Day. Established by the UN General Assembly in 1993, World Water Day is held every March 22nd “as a means of focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.” Although it may be hard for the vast majority of Americans to believe, over 1 billion people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water.
For the most part, Americans take municipal water supplies for granted. This is true, I suspect, even for people who live in regions that face water seasonal water shortages (readers in drought-prone regions, I’m curious: are you ever afraid your tap will be turned off? or that you won’t be able to put food on your table?). The same is true of our wastewater and stormwater infrastructure. Until our basements flood, sewers back up, and our roads wash out, as they did last week in the the Northeast, the vast and complex systems that collect and channel and treat storm and waste water fly beneath our radar screens. They shouldn’t though. For the ways in which we use water directly contribute to water woes both in our home regions and elsewhere.
Annie Leonard’s The Story of Bottled Water paints a compelling picture of the negative impacts that our bottled water habit has on far flung corners of the world. Did you know that the recycling rate for disposable water bottles is a mere 20%? And that a good portion of this 20% is actually shipped overseas to places like India and China where instead of being recycled, the bottles are downcycled or simply discarded? And did you know that our appetite for bottled water can threaten the water supplies of people halfway around the world?
This is almost mind-boggling but it’s true. Yesterday I read an Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy blog post about this: After Coke opened a bottling plant in Kerala, India in 2002 (the plant has since closed) water depletion and pollution became so bad that residents were forced to walk 10 km to access safe drinking water. That was 10 km, twice daily!
But it isn’t just our bottled water habit (Americans consume .5 billion bottles of water each day!) that is a problem. Around our country, watersheds face serious threats from run off, aging infrastructure, and demand outstripping supply. Even the Greater Boston area where I live, which has plentiful rainfall and a high quality public water supply, isn’t immune to water woes. There are many signs—from dry riverbeds in summer, to algae growth and increased storm runoff in our waterways (not to mention the flood we experienced last week)—that we may be afflicted by more frequent and more severe water woes in the near future.
Take last week’s Northeaster, a 100-year storm that dumped more than 10 inches of rain in the Boston area in 3 days, precipitated MWRA’s release of 15 million tons of untreated sewage into Qunicy Bay, and caused record flooding. Was this a freak “act of nature”? An event out of our control and over which we exercised no influence? Well, yes and no.
Identifying the factors that contributed to last week’s flooding and determining the nature and extent of our influence on these is exceedingly complex and certainly beyond my capacity. Nevertheless, you don’t have to know all that much about the engineered water cycle (the system by which we withdraw, transport, and treat water) to know that it likely exacerbated the flooding.
Flooding is a direct and almost unavoidable consequence of urban and suburban development, at least as it has been practiced over the last half century. When we drain and fill wetlands, cut down forests, put up housing developments on former farmland, and build lots of roads and parking lots so that we can drive everywhere, we destroy nature’s water management system.
On undeveloped land “a significant portion of rainfall in forested watersheds is absorbed into soils (infiltration), is stored as ground water, and is slowly discharged to streams through seeps and springs.” Development that replaces permeable with impervious surfaces (concrete, asphalt, etc.) impedes infiltration and creates runoff, which in turn needs to be managed by extensive infrastructure. This infrastructure channels immense amounts of water into streams increasing both the likelihood and severity of flooding (summary courtesy of the USGS).
There is a lot we can do to mitigate flood risks by, for example, replacing impervious surfaces with permeable ones and requiring developers to manage storm water runoff onsite. Floods are, however, just one among many water woes that we residents of Eastern MA may face in years to come–including severe water shortages in most communities by 2030 (Charles River Watershed Association, Water Resource Conservation & Restoration in MA, 2006, p. 3. Click here to access the paper).
My point is not to depress or to scare, although the challenges involved in creating a sustainable water infrastructure do seem overwhelming (to learn more about this issue check out the EPA’s Low Impact Development page). Rather it’s to raise awareness and to suggest that we all–in honor of World Water Day–try to adjust our radar screens to take into account the reality of our local, regional and global water woes.
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