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Earth Science

Global Fresh Water Demand Will Outstrip Supply By 40% by 2030, Say Experts (theguardian.com) 136

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The world is facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40% by the end of this decade, experts have said on the eve of a crucial UN water summit. From a report: Governments must urgently stop subsidising the extraction and overuse of water through misdirected agricultural subsidies, and industries from mining to manufacturing must be made to overhaul their wasteful practices, according to a landmark report on the economics of water. Nations must start to manage water as a global common good, because most countries are highly dependent on their neighbours for water supplies, and overuse, pollution and the climate crisis threaten water supplies globally, the report's authors say.

Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, and a lead author of the report, told the Guardian the world's neglect of water resources was leading to disaster. "The scientific evidence is that we have a water crisis. We are misusing water, polluting water, and changing the whole global hydrological cycle, through what we are doing to the climate. It's a triple crisis." Rockstrom's fellow Global Commission on the Economics of Water co-chair Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at University College London and also a lead author of the report, added: "We need a much more proactive, and ambitious, common good approach. We have to put justice and equity at the centre of this, it's not just a technological or finance problem."
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Global Fresh Water Demand Will Outstrip Supply By 40% by 2030, Say Experts More

Global Fresh Water Demand Will Outstrip Supply By 40% by 2030, Say Experts

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  • Probably should store it instead of flushing it out into the sea, then, huh?

  • Wonder if our kids can/will make something like this? Where it's obvious what happens when one person does something. They could even set it up so one of the players is prodded (told to or rewarded) to hurt the shared resource without asking. Then everyone else needs to figure out it's happening and stop it.

    Guess there could be random turns where "opportunities" appear. Like "You found a really shiny rock! Wonder if there are more under that forest or in the mountain?"

    • There are elements of this in Civ VI, which has global warming. Shoreline hexes have one of five elevations, three of which flood when warming is extended and sea level rises. But it's still basically a board game at heart, and water supplies are not modeled at all. Rivers have (psuedo?)random floods, and if you've built a dam then the floods only have positive effects and the negative ones are suppressed, but that's it.

      I keep hoping someone will make a maximally scientifically based geopolitical simulator,

  • Pretty bad for everybody affected, but not a surprise at all. Will get worse though. Outstrip sustainability limits by growing too much and get hit with effects like this one.

  • French Frie Processing Super Water Intensive (Score:5, Informative)

    by theshowmecanuck ( 703852 ) on Friday March 17, 2023 @04:09PM (#63379113) Journal

    I did work on a project ages ago (like 30 years) where we were looking to see if membrane separation could be used to clean and reuse water that went through the blanchers used as a main step in processing potatoes for the frozen french fry market. The place went through one million pounds of potatoes per day and 2 million gallons of water per day. The blanchers were the biggest use. It is actually more difficult than you would think because potato starch is a massive molecule and there is a lot of protein from the potatoes in the water as well. They clog the membranes quickly. You have to pretreat the hot waste water before you can remotely get it to work. It can be done but not sure how economically it is; that was for someone else to calculate, I just built and ran the pilot unit.

    In case you're wondering, blanching is done so that anyone can cook them according to the instructions and they will always have the same crispy golden brown-ness when done. It is the starch that turns them brown and different potato batches have different starch content. They blanch then in a massive stainless steel tank that is around 7 metres wide by maybe 2 metres deep and 20 metres long. They are fed through on catepillar type of stainless steel feed chain that had a bed as wide as the tank, that (I'm not sure what it looked inside because the tank was covered) moved the cut fries from one end to the other. At the other end there were sprayers that coated them with a dextrose and antibacterial preservative (I think at the time sodium metabisulphite). They would take samples frequently from just before the sprayers, to a shake within the facility for colour testing. They would cook the fries to completeness (remember before the dextrose was applied), and then measure the colour of the properly cooked crispy fries. They would be pretty white as there was no excess starch by then.They had a chart that would tell them based on the tested colour, how much added dextrose they needed to add t get them to the proper brownness. They would do a similar test from after the sprayers to ensure the flow was good. Then they would par fry them so you didn't have to cook them too long when delivered to the restaurant or taken home. Then they would bag them and send them through a blast freezing process and into a freezer for distribution. FWIW, the parts of the potatoes that were too short to make into fries, would be diverted and ground up to make either MacDonald's type hashbrowns, potato puffs, or instant mash potatoes. I watched it all around me and so if anyone has any weird stories about what those things are made of, they are completely full of shit. They are made out of potatoes straight up. If I came in late from drinking the night before :) I did what the plant workers sometimes did, take the par fried hashbrowns and run a few through the parfrier a few times and have a hashbrown breakfast.

  • It is absolutely a (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Friday March 17, 2023 @04:32PM (#63379165)
    Technological and finance problem. Personally, I value equity, fairness and inclusion. But if you put fairness first and demand a first-world solution for every spot on the planet, you will arrive at a solution that simply Will. Not. Happen.

    There are places where people are living on a dollar a day. The rich world simply isn’t going to ship over several desalination plants and the nuclear plant required to run them. Fair? Yes. Equitable? Yes. Viable? Sorry, no. The rich countries are barely even willing to donate a few snickers bars.

    If the activists are running the show and refuse to be realistic, it will lead to no action at all. This would actually suit the rich world fine. They’ll manage on their own.

    Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

  • Agricultural subsidies? (Score:5, Informative)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Friday March 17, 2023 @05:24PM (#63379311)

    You mean like Saudi Arabia gets to pump [npr.org] unlimited amounts of water out of the ground in Arizona so it can grow alfalfa which is then shipped overseas to Saudi Arabia because, wait for it, Saudi Arabia drained its own aquifers growing alfalfa for its cows? Or did they mean the United Arab Emirates doing the same thing [cnn.com]?

    • Or did they mean the United Arab Emirates doing the same thing?

      UAE is building nuclear power plants so they don't have to drill for ground water or burn fossil fuels to get fresh water for irrigation and drinking. They can desalinate water from the sea. They have four reactors now, three of which are producing power and the other will be soon.

      This will of course bring out the people that are opposed to nuclear power. What do you want? You want people to die of hunger and thirst? It appears that is the case, and some people are quite open about how we need to thin

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jwhyche ( 6192 )

        What do you want? You want people to die of hunger and thirst? It appears that is the case, and some people are quite open about how we need to thin the human population

        Some of them don't have a problem with this. There is at least one of the most vehement anti nuclear poser is more than happy to let people die of hunger as long as it means a nuclear free future.

        • These people will have to learn that there will not be a nuclear free future so long as nuclear power provides an advantage in economics and in the military. That military advantage I refer to is not in making bombs but in making submarines. This advantage also exists in surface ships also but hasn't got the same length of history behind it yet to make it difficult to go back like with submarines.

          The advantages of nuclear power in naval vessels can be directly translated to life on land. We could have pe

  • Although some have suggested building dedicated nuclear plants to do desalination at scale, there may be a cheaper way. At the equator, a gigawatt of solar energy arrives per square kilometre, for free. First, assume we have a reservoir of fresh water, which we start vaporizing with a large field of solar mirrors, producing low-pressure steam. Feed the low pressure steam through a turbine where the steam is pressurized, not by burning jet fuel, but by further heating by the solar mirror array, producing

    • The whole idea that you need nuclear for desal is dumb AF for sure, because the places where you need the water you have the sun. You don't need large fields of solar mirrors to operate solar thermal heat pipes, either.

    • Ah yes. Salt. The bane of literally every turbine system since the concept of steam injection was created.

      • Yes, that's why I'm injecting the seawater after the the steam has been superheated and is moving speedily along its pipe. Mechanically removing the salt crystals, first by inertial methods, then perhaps via filtration, will give up some of that heat and velocity, but yield freshwater steam for input to the next solar-powered turbine.
    • The advantage of nuclear is that it can be used 24-7, which may suit some desalination processes. In some countries, sunlight is sufficiently predictable that you'd need to look at the feasibility of that too.

  • Why would you drink water like animals?

  • You'll just have to pay $300 for a pound of real meat so it reflects the real cost. We need to end water entitlements with the understanding that water should belong to everyone. If you take more you should pay more and we should all pay the same price.
  • Desalination is a solved problem.

  • Agriculture bad. Stop eating to save the planet.

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