Chasing Water by Richter
Ref: Brian Richter (2014). Chasing Water: A Guide for Moving from Scarcity to Sustainability. Island Press.
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Summary
Few places are experiencing water shortages on a continual basis. Instead, water shortages tend to be episodic in nature, emerging during dry seasons or during droughts.
Half of the world’s cities with populations greater than 100,000 are situated in water-stressed areas.
The 20c taught us that top-down, state-run technocracies are simply not willing to or cannot properly allocate, monitor, and govern water in a way that would forestall scarcity.
The challenge of water scarcity boils down to gaining an understanding of water budgets, selecting the best options for resolving or avoiding water shortages, funding and implementing those options, protecting ecological and human health, and then continuously learning and improving over time.
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Rivers
In their free-flowing form, large rivers are among the most productive, life-supporting ecosystems on the planet. These natural supermarkets continue to feed hundreds of millions of poor people each and every day. River and floodplain fisheries are a critical source of food and income for >1B people living in developing regions.
When the day-to-day water flow in a river is depleted by more than about 20%, it becomes increasingly likely that the ecological health of a river—the river ecosystem—will suffer; fish populations decline and some sensitive species disappear altogether, or a river’s ability to provide important ecological functions such as flushing away waste material or other pollutants is diminished. Half of the world’s rivers are being depleted by more than 20% during some portion of the year, which helps explain why freshwater animals such as fish, turtles, and frogs are the most imperiled groups of species on our planet.
Dams/Reservoirs
Dams and their reservoirs are the leading cause of the decline of fish and other river species globally because they block the movement and change the flow of water, nutrients, and sediments through the river ecosystem.
Lake Mead: Stores 2 years of the CO River flow.
Murray-Darling: E. Australian Watershed exhibiting boom and bust ecology.
Water-Scarce Rivers: Armeria (Mexico), Brazos (USA), Cauvery (India), Chao Phraya (Thailand), Chira (Ecuador/Peru), Colorado (USA), Conception (Mexico), Doring (S. Africa), Fuerte (Mexico), Ganges (India/Bangladesh), Godavari (India), Huasco (Chile), Indus (Pakistan), Karishna (India), Los Angeles (USA), Loa (Chile), Mahi (India), Murray-Darling (Australia), Narmada (India), Penner (India), Rio Bravo (USA), Rio Grande (USA), Sacramento (USA), San Joaquin (USA), Santiago (Mexico), Shebelle (Ethiopia/Somalia), Tapti (India), Tarim (China), Yellow (China), Yondling (China).
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Aquifers
Global water modelers have estimated that we are now depleting our planet’s aquifers at the rate of more than 200 km3 per year.
Mexico’s consumption of groundwater exceeds natural recharge by 20%, China’s by 25%, and India’s by 56%.
Water Scarce Aquifers: Central Valley (USA), High Plains (USA), Lower Indus (India/Pakistan), Nile Delta (Egypt), N. Arabian (Saudi Arabia), N. Plain (China), Persian (Iran), Upper Ganges (India).
High Plains Aquifer, USA: One of the world’s largest aquifers spanning an area of ~450,000km2 across 8 states in the central USA comprising a fifth of all US cropland and creating one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world for corn, wheat, soybeans, and livestock. The High Plains is a massive reservoir of sand and silt that was deposited millions of years ago as the Rocky Mountains eroded and sediments were washed or blown into ancient valleys, filling them to depths of more than 400m in some places. Water is being pumped out of the aquifer 10x faster than it is being replenished, which is limited by meager precipitation and land evaporation. Consumptive losses of water have caused the water level in the High Plains Aquifer to drop by more than 1.5m per year overall, and by more than 70m in some places. In total, the High Plains Aquifer has lost less than 10% of its water volume since the 1950s.
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Lakes & Seas
Water Scarce Seas: Aral (Kazakhstan/Uzbekistan), Dead (Jordan/Israel), Great Salt Lake (USA).
Aral Sea: In less than 50 years, virtually the entire Aral Sea—once the world’s 12th largest lake—was dried up as the former USSR tried to grow rice, melons, and cotton in the desert surrounding the lake.
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—Water Consumption—
The whole human enterprise—cities, industry, agriculture—is currently using only 12% of all of the water that flows into and through the planet’s rivers, lakes, and aquifers on a continual basis. The Four most commonly used categories are irrigated agriculture, domestic (home or business) use, industrial use, and electricity generation.
>90% of all water depletions are due to irrigated agriculture.
In the interest of reducing Carbon emissions, >60 countries have created mandates or subsidies to stimulate biofuel production. Those subsidies have substantially shifted overall agricultural production toward biofuel crops such as corn for ethanol, causing a spike in consumptive use of water due to greatly increased irrigation needs for biofuels, and generating widespread shortages of corn and other foods for human consumption.
Consumptive Water Use: Evaporation, Transpiration, Percolation
Residential: ~10-30% of the water withdrawn and used for domestic purposes is consumptively lost; those losses can get as high as 50-70% of withdrawn water if a lot of water is used for outdoor landscape watering.
Industrial: Consumptive loss is ~5-20% of the water withdrawn.
Energy Generation: Consumptively use only 2-5% of water withdrawn.
Agriculture: ~40-50% of water used for agriculture makes its way back to a water source as return flow.
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—Water Scarcity Methodology—
Assess
Look upstream, or look to other users of your aquifer, and consider how water is being consumptively used.
Collaborate
Consider which of the following three options is most feasible or desirable:
Can you work with those upstream or other aquifer users to reduce the amount of water they are consumptively using?
Can you reduce the amount of water you need to withdraw and use at your location?
Can you somehow supplement the amount of water available to you, such as by bringing water in from outside your local watershed or aquifer?
Local
Ensure Local Water Governance such as watershed councils, aquifer management districts, and river basin organizations whose focus is a single water source.
Enable and empower more localized decision-making and management processes that can be rightsized to the particular needs, uses, economics, and cultures associated with the sharing of water sources.
Water policy experts around the world are now stressing a need to move away from reliance on centralized, top-down, governmental technocracies in water management and a need to move toward more inclusive and durable water governance systems.
Most countries have taken the position that water should be publicly owned, with the national government acting as the public custodian of water.
Funding
Ensure we financially support our governments efforts to manage our water resources well.
Many people believe that in keeping with the philosophy that access to water is a basic human right, water should be delivered free of charge. That sentiment makes it politically difficult for water managers to generate sufficient revenues from water sales to keep water systems running properly.
Options
Consider the options from highest to lowest cost; Desalinization, Water Reuse, Water Importation, Water Storage, Watershed Management, and Water Conservation…
Plan
Conduct Long Range Planning; many groups have adopted a 50-yr planning horizon for water management with regular 5yr adjustment intervals.
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—Water Scarcity Options—
Desalinization
Desalinization: Removing salts and other minerals from seawater or brackish (salty) groundwater.
Advantages: Protects surface water sources from further depletion.
Disadvantages: Expensive due to e- generation, produces CO2 emissions, brine disposal is costly and unecological. Desal’s potential to resolve water scarcity more broadly will be quite limited until the energy demands of the technology are reduced substantially and brine disposal challenges are resolved.
Distillation: Boiling of salty water to separate (evaporate) the freshwater from the salts.
Reverse Osmosis: Salt water is pushed through a semipermeable membrane that allows water molecules to pass through but not salts or other minerals. Typically, about half of the salt water processed in desalination ends up becoming freshwater, leaving behind a heavily concentrated waste known as brine.
Saudi Arabia: The world’s heaviest investor in desal technology. They are now building the world’s largest solar desal plant, and intend to eventually convert all of their desal facilities to solar power.
Water Reuse
Water Reuse (aka Water Recycling): Purification (treatment) of water after use in homes, businesses, or industries and then putting the water to another use. In the reuse process, impurities are removed from the wastewater to a level appropriate for its intended reuse. Most commonly, the reused water is applied to farms, golf courses, and other landscape areas in rapidly growing urban areas and is sometimes used in power plant–cooling facilities or other industrial processes.
Israel (global leader): Reuses ~80% of all water it withdraws from freshwater sources.
Disadvantages: Energy intensive.
Water Importation
Water Importation (aka Interbasin Transfer): The inter-transfer of water from one watershed to another.
Basin of Origin Limitations: Many governments have instituted protections that limit or prohibit transfers of water from one watershed or aquifer to another.
Virtual Water: The amount of water required to grow a product, which is then exported to markets outside the watershed of origin; each piece of fruit, the barley and hops that go into a glass of beer, and the cotton in a shirt all require water to grow or be manufactured.
185 liters to grow an apple; 300 liters of water for a liter of beer; 2,500 liters for a cotton shirt.
Water Importation Projects
North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA): Conceived in the 1960s by the Ralph M. Parsons Corporation- envisioned diverting water from rivers in AK and then moving the water south through Canada to eventually rewater the parched US SW.
South-North Water Transfer Project: A $62B trio of long-distance, high-volume canals to move water over thousands of km’s from the Yangtze River to water-stressed cities and farms to N. China.
California State Water Project: Moves water from N. to S. CA.
Central Arizona Project: Moves water from the CO River to Phoenix and Tucson.
India’s River Linking Project: Connects 37 different rivers using 9000km of canals at ~$140B.
Water Storage
Rainwater Harvesting: Rainfall capture.
Stormwater Capture: Rainfall and runoff from urbanized areas is captured in small reservoirs, where it can percolate into an aquifer and later be retrieved.
Watershed Management
Working for Water: A South African non-profit that employs more than 20K people in removing undesirable vegetation from more than 1M hA.
Water Conservation
Water Conservation: Maximizing water use efficiency; the first place to invest; its potential should be maximized before other tools are deployed.
The greatest overall gains and cost-effectiveness in water conservation will be realized in reducing consumptive losses in irrigation, both in the city and on the farm. Water scarcity could be substantially resolved in most of those watersheds with a 15-20% reduction in irrigation consumption.
1) Reduce Consumptive Loss. Invest in measures that make more water available for people and nature.
Rivers: Assess how much water is being consumptively used in the watershed upstream of your location, such as in irrigated agriculture.
Lake & Aquifers: Assess how much of the water being used is not returned to the lake or aquifer after use. Where are the greatest volumes of water being lost?
Infrastructure: Leaky pipes should be one of the first places for cities to look for opportunities. The U.S. EPA estimates that about 17% of all water distributed to homes and businesses in the US is lost due to leaky pipes. Boston loses 30% of its water, and London loses almost 50%. Upgrading the US’ water and wastewater systems is expected to cost ~$384B over the next 20 years.
2) Reduce withdrawal from sources. Are there times of the year, or certain years, during which there is insufficient water available for your withdrawal needs? In the vicinity of your water use, who is withdrawing and using the greatest volumes of water? Can you or other water users reduce water withdrawals by implementing more efficient ways to use water, so that the pressure on the stressed water source can be reduced?
Drip Irrigation: Water is delivered directly to plant roots through plastic tubes (vice sprinkler irrigation).
Subsidies: Provide subsidies for implementing water conservation measures.
Water Pricing: Charge Urban residents more as they use greater volumes of water.
Agricultural water conservation is the clear winner in water conservation. Its cost-effectiveness, lack of adverse environmental impacts, potential benefits to water quality by reducing polluted runoff, and ability to substantially reduce overall consumptive use within the watershed make it a highly attractive option.
Weather Modification
Weather Modification Cloud seeding via injection of AgI crystals or dry ice into the atmosphere as cloud condensation nuclei to induce precipitation.
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—Water Sustainability Principles—
Sustainable Water Use: The use of water that supports the ability of human society to endure and flourish into the indefinite future without undermining the integrity of the hydrological cycle or the ecological systems that depend on it.”-Peter Gleick.
Basic methods to balance a budget: Increase deposits or reduce expenditures; find new sources of water supply or reduce water use.
Corporate Water Responsibility
Learn the language of water budgets and strategically contribute resources toward cost-effective and practical solutions that can rebalance overdrawn budgets.
Supplement, and never supplant, the role of governments in managing water. Their ultimate goal should be to build the capacity of governments and local communities to manage water well.
Principle #1: Build a shared vision for your community’s water future.
The pursuit of effective water governance is in essence a search for the right balance in authorities, leadership, and resources among governmental entities, the private sector, and civil society.
The “right” solution to any community’s water shortage problems will depend on different factors: cost, environmental impacts, energy requirements, land ownership, and other considerations.
Key management decisions should be made as close to the scene of events and the actors involved as possible.-Governing the Commons by Ostrom.
The per-unit cost of either supplying or saving water (e.g. $/m3) is almost always the most prominent influence in plans for addressing water shortages.
Principle #2: Set limits on total consumptive use of water.
The single most important rule that a community of water users can adopt will be the setting of a limit or “cap” on total consumptive use of water.
Option 1: Create a Virtual Lineup of Water Use Entitlements, and Supply Water to Each Sequential User in the Line until All of the Available Water Has Been Consumed
Prior Appropriation: First in Time, First in Right.
Option 2: Create a Reserve of Water to Ensure That Basic Human Needs and Ecosystems Are Protected, Then Allocate the Remainder. Watershed-specific reserves have two parts:
Basic Human Needs Reserve: Ensures that everyone living in the watershed is guaranteed sufficient water to meet basic needs such as drinking, cooking, and washing.
Ecological Reserve: Ensures enough water in rivers or lakes to support their ecological health.
Option 3: Set a Cap on the Total Volume of Water That Can Be Consumptively Used during the Driest Years, but then Allow Additional Allocations during Wetter Years.
Cap-and-Flex: The limiting, or capping, of high-security entitlements provides certainty in how much water can be used in the driest years, while the flex feature enables water users to access additional water through low-security entitlements during wetter years, thereby fostering maximum economic productivity.
Principle #3: Allocate a specific volume to each user, then monitor and enforce.
Quantification should be defined for each month of the year, because water availability can vary substantially.
High-Security Entitlements: Every individual or family must be guaranteed an inalienable entitlement to enough water to meet basic needs.
Principle #4: Invest in water conservation to its maximum potential.
Water conservation is by far the least expensive way of addressing a water shortage.
Principle #5: Enable trading of water entitlements.
Ensure appropriate regulatory controls and other essential water governance functions are put into place explicitly and early, so water entitlements are not bought up by wealthy entities—water speculators, big corporations, or cities—leaving poorer people or freshwater ecosystems without water.
Water buyers should not be allowed to hoard water by acquiring water entitlements and not using them, and they should not be allowed to transport water out of a stressed watershed.
Principle #6: If too much water is being consumptively used, subsidize reductions in consumption.
Stimulus for improving irrigation efficiency.
Principle #7: Learn from mistakes or better ideas, and adjust as you go.
Enable water plans to be revisited on a regular basis.
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Terminology
Aquifer: An underground basin containing water originating from rain or melting snow that percolates into the ground. The water can be extracted using groundwater wells and pumps. More common, is for the water to soak into buried sediments or porous rock—think of a swimming pool filled with sand.
Water Table: The water level in an aquifer.
Boom and Bust Ecology: A natural watershed ecosystem that experiences dramatic changes between wet and dry years. When rain is plentiful and the rivers rise out of their banks and onto their vast floodplains, it’s “boom” time. Thousands of wetlands scattered across the watershed turn from brown to green, plants burst into flower, fish populations swell, and millions of waterbirds breed in the marshes. Then, during the “bust” years—the interludes between wet periods—the natural ecosystems slip into quiescence, and the adaptive physiologies of the native species, honed over thousands of years of evolution, are put to the test. During dry years, crops and natural vegetation will require more water than usual, owing to high temperatures and evaporation rates. With less rainfall available and higher water loss to crops and other plants, much less runoff makes its way through the watershed into the river. During dry years, water will also evaporate more quickly from reservoirs, at the same time that farmers are pulling more water from the reservoirs for irrigating their crops.
Civil Society: Individuals and organizations concerned with water, ranging from local watershed activists to subsistence farmers, and also including NGOs that represent environmental or social interests.
Conjunctive Use (aka Aquifer Storage and Recovery): Underground water storage; involves injecting water extracted from a river or lake during high-water periods into an aquifer, and then later pumping the water back out of the aquifer for use during periods when less water is available in the river or lake.
Environmental Flow Assessment: Determines the volume and timing of water flows needed to sustain ecological health and other social values.
Evaporative Loss: Loss of freshwater to evaporation.
Flood Irrigation: Complete inundation of a farm field with water.
Nakinbaey: A supernatural being producing and inhabiting water sources and other sacred sites in the Northern Philippines (Besao people). To ensure adequate water supply, therefore, people should do nothing that would upset the nakinbaey and cause it to leave the source.
Private Sector: Includes private businesses and corporations.
Pulse Flow: Periodic releases of water from upstream reservoirs to bring downriver environments back to life.
Tragedy of the Commons: Results when a shared resource—a forest, a fishery, a water source—is depleted by individuals acting independently and according to each one’s self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting the common resource is contrary to the whole group’s long-term interests (Hardin).
Water Allocation: The right to use water, subject to governmental regulation.
Water Bankruptcy: The overuse of water that causes economic, social, and ecological disruption.
Water Depletion Index: Depicts water scarcity status of water basins.
Water Entitlements: Grants the right to use water, used primarily in places experiencing water shortages.
Riparian Right: An entitlement given to landowners located along the bank of a river or lake.
Water Scarcity: A condition that occurs when there is insufficient water available at reasonable cost to fulfill human needs and to sustain the health of freshwater ecosystems.
Water Withdrawal: Extraction of water from a water source, such as a river or lake or aquifer.
Return Flow: Water returned to the original source after use.
Consumptive Use: The portion of used water that is not returned to the original source; it is lost or depleted.
Watershed: The area of land draining to a particular river or lake.
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Misc Quotes
“The next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics.”-Boutros Boutros Ghali (1985).
“Many conflicts around the world are being fueled or exacerbated by water shortages.”-Ban Ki-Moon (2008).
“We take this water to grow flowers and then ship them 5,000 miles to Europe so that people can say ‘I love you, darling’ and then throw them away three days later. To me that is an immoral act.”-Isaac Oumo Oloo on flower exports to Europe from Kenya.
“An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.”-Thomas Jefferson.
“Democracy is supposed to be inclusive, transparent, experimental, and adaptive. That means messy, slow, and oftentimes inefficient.”
“Key management decisions should be made as close to the scene of events and the actors involved as possible.”-Governing the Commons by Ostrom.
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Resources
Trans-boundary Freshwater Dispute Database: Identifies places where water conflicts have erupted or where they are being resolved, such as through water treaties among countries that share the same river or aquifer.
WaterGap: Global hydrology model.
Environmental Defense Fund
Nature Conservancy
Water Action Hub: Developed by the Water Mandate for companies to identify collaborators sharing the same water source.
US Corps of Engineers: One of the world’s largest water management agencies, with responsibility for operating nearly 700 dams and much other water infrastructure in the US.
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Chronology
Mar, 2013: A federal judge rules that the state of TX had violated the US ESA by overallocating water in the Guadalupe and San Antonio Rivers. These rivers provide freshwater inflows into San Antonio Bay, the winter home of highly endangered whooping cranes.-Chasing Water by Richter.
2013: The World Water Vision is released by the World Water Council emphasizing that “the crisis is not about having too little water to satisfy our needs. It is a crisis of managing water so badly that billions of people—and the environment—suffer badly.”-Chasing Water by Richter.
2013: Netafim, a leading worldwide provider of equipment for improving irrigation efficiency, is awarded the Stockholm Industry Water Award.-Chasing Water by Richter.
Oct, 2012: >5,000 farmers and activists from the state of Karnataka in India attempt to seize control of the Krishna Raja Sagar Dam on the Cauvery River, in an effort to shut off water releases to the downstream state of Tamil Nadu. -Chasing Water by Richter.
2007: Senate Bill 3 is passed in TX calling for the appointment of science and stakeholder committees to make recommendations on the environmental flows needed to maintain the ecological integrity of the state’s rivers.-Chasing Water by Richter.
2007: Coca-Cola launches a global Replenish program to make more water available to local communities and freshwater ecosystems by investing in local community water projects, such as drilling new gw wells in poor rural communities or reforesting denuded watersheds to improve their water flows.-Chasing Water by Richter.
2007: The Australian Water Act of 2007 is signed calling for a minimum reduction of 3 BCM (2.4 MAF) in the existing level of consumptive use basin-wide. Much of the rollback in water use is predicated on the need to protect at least 60%, and preferably 80%, of the natural flow in all rivers and streams in the watershed to restore their ecological health.-Chasing Water by Richter.
2007: The CEO Water Mandate program is launched by the UN, facilitating a productive dialogue among hundreds of national and multinational corporations, investment and development banks, nongovernmental organizations, academic institutions, and other interested parties.-Chasing Water by Richter.
2002: The Sustainable Rivers Project is implemented by the Nature Conservancy and the Corps of Engineers, to explore ways to improve dam operations to benefit ecological health, recreational opportunities, flood management, water supplies, and production of e- through hydropower generation.-Chasing Water by Richter.
2002: The Living Murray initiative is launched by the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council committing $700M to the program over 5 years to purchase 500M m3 of water entitlements, to be held by the Australian government and used for environmental purposes.-Chasing Water by Richter.
2001: The Great Lakes Charter Annex is passed making large-volume exports of water from the Great Lakes unlikely.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1999: Cash for Grass is introduced in Las Vegas, NV paying homeowners nearly $17 per m2 to remove and replace grass lawns with desert vegetation that does not require watering -Chasing Water by Richter.
1999: The Bolivian government contracts a private consortium including the Bechtel Corporation and other companies to administer the public water supply system of Cochabamba. The 40yr, $2.5B concession was intended “to provide water and sanitation services to the residents of Cochabamba, as well as generate electricity and irrigation for agriculture.” As part of the deal, the private consortium was required to absorb $30M in debt that had accrued during the Bolivian government’s inadequate management of the water system, make substantial improvements in the city’s debilitated water distribution system, and increase water supplies by building a new storage reservoir. According to the consortium’s representatives, the rate hike was instituted as the means for funding these projects.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1997-2009: The Millennium Drought in Australia (aka the Big Dry) leaves canals, rivers, and streams throughout the Murray-Darling Watershed dry and farmers with limited water for irrigation. Agricultural water use during the drought dropped by two-thirds, because of the great reductions in allocations given to each water entitlement, but farm revenues dropped by only 20% due largely to huge increases in water productivity (amount of revenue generated per unit of water consumed). The amount of water used to produce each dollar of farm revenue dropped by a whopping 241% during the drought.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1997: “The Cap” is introduced on consumptive use in the watershed, setting a limit on total maximum water consumption at 11 BCM (8.9 MAF) per year (~1992-1994 consumption levels).-Chasing Water by Richter.
1997: The Millennium Drought begins begin as river flows drops precipitously.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1997: The Kenya Lake Naivasha Growers Group is formed by Lake Naivasha Flower Companies concerned with their water supplies and fearing damage to their corporate reputations.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1995: Australia’s New South Wales government privatizes five of its irrigation districts.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1992: The Convention on Biological Diversity is adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1991: New South Wales, Australia declares a state of emergency after the lower 1000km of the Darling River turns into a toxic, stinking, slimy ooze of blue-green algae, killing most everything that lived in the river, and tainting public drinking water supplies.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1990s: Saddam Hussein punishes the Marsh Arabs (Shi’a Muslims) in S. Iraq for their insurrection against his regime, by using dams to shut off the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers into the Mesopotamian Marshes.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1980: Peak of US water withdrawals (which have remained constant ever since). While the U.S. population grows, water withdrawal has decreased primarily through improved water-use efficiencies in e- production and irrigated agriculture.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1978: State Water Project 78 is completed in CA reaching 800 km into N. CA rivers to bring water to southern coastal cities.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1973: The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) is established to protect critically imperiled species of plants and animals from going extinct due to “economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation.”-Chasing Water by Richter.
1971: The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (aka the Ramsar Convention) is signed in Ramsar, Iran; allows signatory countries to register specific wetland areas for international recognition. Those countries must then commit to their protection.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1969: The US Cuyahoga River catches fire due to a heavy concentration of oil and other chemicals in the water, helping to set off a sea change in U.S. environmental legislation.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1967: The Six-Day War in the Middle East is sparked, in part, by tension over a Syrian project to divert the Jordan River.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1966: The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is adopted by the UN General Assembly pledging commitment to basic rights for citizens of signatory countries. The UN clarified that “the human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses.”-Chasing Water by Richter.
1957: The Texas Water Development Board is established following a decade long drought in TX during which half of the state’s farmers had left. The board is charged with projecting water supply needs over a long horizon of 50 years and provides funding to build new water projects.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1939: The CO River Aqueduct is completed connecting the Parker Dam reservoir with city taps in SOCAL.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1938: The Parker Dam on the CO River is completed.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1936: The Hoover Dam on the CO River is completed (largest in the world at the time).-Chasing Water by Richter.
1922: The Colorado River Compact (aka Law of the River) is signed allocating portions of the river to each of the seven states through which the river flows. The compact was based on an estimate that the river carried 21.6B m3 of water each year on average (based on 1905-1922 flow which included periods of abnormally high rainfall) and allocated 19.7B m3 among the seven states, with roughly half of it going to the states sharing the upper river, and the other half to the downstream states.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1944: Arizona subsequently signs the Colorado River Compact.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1915: The River Murray Waters Agreement is signed clarifying how water would be shared among the three Australian states, and also greatly facilitated interstate collaboration in building a network of dams, locks, and weirs to distribute water.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1870s: Farmers first began settling in the Australian Murray-Darling watershed.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1850s: Gold is discovered in Australia bringing thousands of new European settlers.-Chasing Water by Richter.
1836: Britain establishes the South Australia Colony on the Adelaide Plains, the first European settlement in Australia.-Chasing Water by Richter.
2500 BCE: War between Umma and Lagash in the Tigris-Euphrates River Basin is fought over water.-Chasing Water by Richter.
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