Image courtesy NASA

Dry weather and pollution are plaguing some of the major lakes in China, Africa, South and North America at the start of the year, posing threats to regional water supplies, fishing, transportation and natural ecosystems.

Drought
A prolonged drought in southeastern China has almost desiccated Poyang Lake, the country’s biggest freshwater lake, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported, citing the Jiangxi provincial hydrographic bureau. The lack of rainfall in regions upstream of the lake, where precipitation in 2011 was 21 percent lower than average, has reduced the flow of the five rivers that feed into Poyang. Earlier this year, the Ganjiang River fell to record low 12.35 meters (40.5 feet). To make matters worse, a slew of new construction projects could be filling in parts of Poyang Lake during the low-water season.

Changing rain patterns are also steadily draining Lake Victoria, the world’s second largest lake by area and a source of the Nile River. Ports along the lake’s shores are struggling to accommodate the large shipping vessels that transport people and cargo between African communities. Some quays have lost as much as 5 meters (16.4 feet) of anchorage depth, and increasingly erratic rainfall linked to climate change will likely make the problem worse.

Mild Winter
In North America, high temperatures and a lack of snow and ice could push the Great Lakes water levels down. The region experienced near record rainfall in 2011, but by December temperatures were higher than average, threatening to offset the gains, according a six-month forecast released in December by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Though lake levels are currently much higher than last year, they will likely drop 5 to 18 centimeters (2 to 7 inches) below 2011 levels by summer if the mild weather continues.

Lake Mead, which straddles the Arizona-Nevada border, is also suffering from a lackluster winter. The region saw virtually no snowfall in January, prompting forecasters to scale back their water supply predictions by 3 billion cubic meters (792.5 billion gallons) — enough to meet current demand levels in the Las Vegas Valley for a decade. While last year’s record snow bolstered the lake, dry winters could force valley communities — which get 90 percent of their water from the Colorado River via Lake Mead — to seek out other sources.

Pollution
Meanwhile, rapid urbanization in El Alto, Bolivia, is threatening Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake. The booming city, which has grown 4 percent a year for the past two decades, is dumping raw sewage, garbage and industrial waste into the rivers that feed Lake Titicaca, posing challenges to fishermen and farmers trying to water their livestock, the Guardian reported. The lake also receives treated wastewater from the El Alto’s severely overtaxed treatment plant.

Sources: AlertNet, China.org, The Detroit News, Guardian, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Xinhua

Video © PBS Frontline

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In the above video, Feliciano dos Santos is described as “one of Mozambique’s best known musicians,” though his lyrics are a bit unconventional. Santos uses his music to, among other things, teach villagers about good hygiene, because he knows firsthand what can result from waterborne illnesses.

That’s because Santos is not just a musician — he’s also the executive director of ESTAMOS, a wonderful non-profit, that focuses on HIV/AIDS, as well as water supply, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). ESTAMOS, under the decisive leadership of Santos, has transformed many lives in the far northern Niassa Province, commonly known as the “Siberia of Mozambique.”

I spent 7 years in Mozambique, working and learning from Santos. I remember once when he stopped a show in a village, because an older man was having health problems. Santos knew that he himself was the only person who had an available vehicle to get the man to a clinic, and the show no longer mattered anymore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ned Breslin is the CEO at Water For People, a nonprofit that implements drinking water and sanitation solutions in 11 developing countries. He is author of Rethinking Hydrophilantropy.

But I’ve also connected with Santos on a personal level. I have shared many meals and watched many soccer matches with him and his family, and his deep love for his children is apparent. Taking after Santos’ talent for music, his son is a promising drummer in a band that Santos mentors. This is just one of the ways that he stays connected, though he cannot run and play with his children as he might like to.

Santos, who lost part of his leg to polio when he himself was a young boy, seems at peace, because he has faith that his children will not have to endure the same adversity as he had growing up. He told Frontline in 2008 of the challenges that he faced growing up, of the stigma associated with polio, and of how difficult it was for his future father-in-law to get over that stigma.

But, fortunately, polio is a disease that is fast receding from our global landscape.

The WASH sector could learn a great deal from the international effort to eradicate polio — spearheaded by Rotary International, the World Health Organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and many other organizations — which began by setting a clear outcome that was achievablee at a global level. They targetted the complete eradication of this dreaded disease, and they measured success/results based on the sustained movement towards that outcome.

In other words, these organizations were not willing to settle for anything less than everyone in the world being safe from polio: and, frankly, their work is the inspiration for Water For People’s Everyone Forever initiative.

I humbly suggest that the WASH sector look to polio eradication as a model of how to improve our impact considerably.

• One Collective Outcome: Polio-eradication agencies programmed, coordinated, and were judged on one collective outcome: to eradicate polio. They stayed focused on their programming and fundraising, proving that together it is possible to achieve a result and to demonstrate significant impact over time. Conversely, the water sector, in general, tends to focus on inputs, even though we all have mission statements that speak of eradicating water poverty — we talk about the need for more projects, more loans, more aid with vague notions of the outcome but with no real, systematic strategy to achieve that outcome. No one is truly saying, “We are putting our reputations on the line by eradicating water poverty in this region of the world.” The Sanitation and Water For All initiative is possibly a step in the right direction for the WASH community, but it needs to start moving to actionable, outcomes-based work soon or, I fear, it will lose credibility. Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) could make the case that it is trying to systemmatically achieve full coverage outcomes, as well.
• Partnerships: For the polio community, a clear focus on one collective outcome led to complementarity, sharing, and partnership that — while far from perfect — represents a significant step ahead of where we are in the WASH sector.
• Achieving That Outcome Over Time: The polio-eradication initative did not begin by establishing all the rules and approaches to polio eradication, nor did they wait until all the pieces needed to succeed were clear or fully in place. They did not have perfect policy. They did not have all the implementation partners in place. They did not even know how Africa was different from Asia or who would be needed in each place to make the program a success. They did not say “my approach is best,” but rather they realized that there would be different roads to the outcome, because, ultimately, it was reaching the outcome that mattered most, not who was best at getting there. Yes, common principles emerged over time, but no one group had a monopoly on an approach.
• Valued Monitoring: Monitoring has been essential to the polio-eradication program and has driven the initiative forward. All parties valued monitoring as a way to track results over time, and they tweaked their monitoring systems as they learned what were the better questions to ask and what were the bigger challemges to address. They did not get bogged down in the endless discussions on the “right indicators,” like that which dominates the WASH dialogue. Some may argue that the Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) is an attempt at a common diagnosis for the state of water and sanitation worldwide, but JMP results do not inform WASH programming as well as a sound global monitoring program could.

For example, the polio community monitored cases very closely. Here’s a wonderful Tweet that sums it up well:

@gatespolio FACT: Reported cases of #polio in #India in 1985: 150,000. Reported cases in 2011: 1

(Last week, we also learned that India had its first year without any new polio cases!)

Some, of course, would argue that polio eradication is completely different from water supply and sanitation, which is of course true —; but that response is simply defensive and misses the point.

The real question is whether or not the WASH sector is willing to take that leap to a commitment of full coverage, where investments made today are rigorously monitored over time — regardless of what impact that may have on an organization’s brand or reputation — so that the words contained in all of our mission statements move from the page to actual actions on the ground.

Click here to learn more and to sign the Everyone Commitment.

Ned Breslin
Follow Ned Breslin on Twitter.

Polio eradication may also shed light on a new type of philanthropy, where outcomes over time will be far better valued than short-term activities, such as completing project A or B or making X number of loans and having Y% of people repay those loans: I will continue on with this subject in a future blog.

Photo © Aubrey Ann Parker/Circle of Blue

Panama is one of the fastest-growing economies in the Western Hemisphere, largely thanks to a new free-trade agreement with the U.S. and an ongoing $US 5.25 billion expansion of the Panama Canal. Slated for completion in 2014, the expansion will double the canal's capacity, which will reduce emissions, and the new system will recycle 60 percent of the water in each transit, along with an overall decrease of 7 percent less water than is used by the existing locks.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

Food
The food crisis in the Horn of Africa will continue this year, according to a famine early warning system funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Though the famine early warning system has global forecasts, the Horn of Africa is the only emergency spot forecasted in the near term.

In response, the United Nations, which said in a statement that the situation is “expected to get worse”, has called for more than $US 2.3 billion in aid to help Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti to cope with refugee settlement and the short-term effects of the drought. At the same time, the executive director for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says that a million children in Africa’s Sahel region are at risk of malnutrition in 2012 because of poor harvests caused by insufficient rain.

Health
Global health leaders are hopeful that 2012 is the year that Guinea worm, a water-borne parasite, will be eradicated. Infections have fallen from 3.5 million in 1986 to 1,056 during the first 10 months of 2011. Following small pox, Guinea worm would be the second-ever human disease to be eradicated. Polio, another water-borne disease, is next in line. Advocates anticipate a polio-free world in 2013.

Energy
Thanks to the payroll tax cut compromise, U.S. President Barack Obama has 60 days to approve or deny a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The 2,700-kilometer (1,700-mile) oil conduit from the Canadian tar sands to refineries in Texas would have an initial capacity of 700,000 barrels per day. The president’s decision should come by the end of February.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will make several final decisions this year that could have consequences for water resources, and the agency will start the rule-making process for several new regulations. In the spring, the EPA will decide what pollution controls are necessary for the Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant that provides nearly all the electricity to move Arizona’s annual share of the Colorado River, 3.5 billion cubic meters (912 billion gallons).

The EPA will also submit a draft rule, expected to be released in January, to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants.

By the end of 2012, preliminary results from the EPA’s investigation into drinking water contamination from hydraulic fracturing will be available. Already this year, Ohio has suspended operations at five deep wells used to dispose of fracking-related fluids, citing concerns of a possible link between well activity and nearly a dozen quakes in the area.

Governments could determine the fate of several large dams on major rivers this year: the Grand Inga on the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the Xayaburi on the Mekong River in Laos; the Mphanda Nkuwa on the Zambezi River in Mozambique; and a cascade of dams on the Nu River in China.

Barring any delays, two World Bank-funded studies on Tajikistan’s proposed Rogun Dam will be completed by the end of the year. The studies are a prerequisite for possible World Bank financing for the project. One study assesses the dam’s technical and economic merits; the other looks at potential environmental and social effects. At 336 meters (1102 feet), Rogun would be the world’s tallest dam, trumping the Nurek Dam, also in Tajikistan.

Policy
In Australia, water management officials are expected to release the final versionof the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, a controversial policy that will reduce the amount of water withdrawn from the basin’s rivers.

During the first half of the year, the U.S. EPA will hold public meetings to formulate a draft version of its new “integrated planning” policy, which will reduce the cost of complying with water quality violations. In October 2011, the agency’s acting assistant administrator for water used a three-page memo to introduce the concept.

March 31 is the target deadline for the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to decide whether or not to approve a plan for removal of four dams in the Klamath River Basin in Oregon and California. The Klamath agreements also include projects for environmental restoration, fisheries, water conservation, and tribal programs.

The Chinese government is expected to release its latest Five-Year Plan for the energy sector. The plan is expected to guide the country’s next phase of hydropower development.

Law
On January 9, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments about landowner rights and government power. The case, Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, began when the EPA claimed an Idaho couple was building their home on a wetland — in violation of the Clean Water Act — and threatened fines of $US 32,500 per day until the couple complied. The Supreme Court will decide whether the EPA violated due process laws. If so, the agency may have to seek permission from a judge before using compliance orders, its most common enforcement tool.

The Nevada state engineer will decide by March whether to grant groundwater rights in four rural valleys to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the wholesale provider for the Las Vegas area.

In August the International Court of Arbitration will submit its final decision on India’s Kishanganga hydroelectric project, a point of contention between India and Pakistan since construction began five years ago. In the fall of 2011, the court issued an interim decision that ordered India to halt construction of works that would permanently affect the river’s flow.

This could be the year that the International Maritime Organization’s convention on ballast water management is approved. The convention would reduce the risk of invasive aquatic species by requiring cargo ships to manage the water they use to balance their loads. For the convention to enter into force, it must be ratified by countries representing 35 percent of the world’s merchant shipping tonnage. To date, the convention is 9 percentage points below that threshold.

Meetings
The sixth edition of the water-sector’s largest gathering, the World Water Forum, will take place March 12 through 17 in Marseille, France. The fourth World Water Development Report will be released that week.

In June, sustainable development advocates will come together in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit, a landmark conference that produced agreements on climate change and biological diversity. This iteration will focus on the green economy and poverty.

Arts
Several water-themed documentaries will be released in 2012. The global water crisis is the subject of Last Call at the Oasis, while actor and director Robert Redford narrates The River Red, a film that considers a new “water ethic” for the Western United States. Hidden history is the topic of Under the City, in which filmmakers go underground to explore rivers buried by urban development in London and New York City, among others.

Photographer Edward Burtynsky, who has turned his lens on the mining and oil industries, is now working on a series about water, which will be completed in 2013.

Brett Walton is a Seattle-based reporter for Circle of Blue. Walton can be reached at brett@circleofblue.org.

Food prices — the focus of this year’s World Food Day, which took place on October 24 — hit record highs in February, when the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s food price index reached 238 points. The index, which measures the international price of a basket of food commodities, had dropped to 225 points by September, but was still 30 points higher than in September 2010, according to the FAO’s most recent report.

Part of the problem is increased trading and speculation in commodity markets, like those in the U.S., NPR reported, citing a letter from 461 global economists. Another factor is water — either too much or too little — that is destroying crucial crop supplies in places like Thailand and the U.S.

The New Price of Food
In some developing countries, floods, droughts, and social conflicts are making food supplies so insecure that families have to spend 50 to 80 percent of their income to eat, according to a British Red Cross press release. To demonstrate this, the Red Cross set up a demonstration market in the United Kingdom, where a loaf of bread cost up to $US 11.47 (£7.20), and a pint of milk could reach a price of $US 6.37 (£4.00), 500 to 800 percent higher than the normal prices for these items.

While food price inflation is not expected to reach these levels in the U.S., the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for food is still projected to rise 2.5 to 3.5 percent in 2012, Bloomberg reported, citing a U.S. Department of Agriculture report. Although these projections are lower than the 3.5 to 4.5 percent increase seen in 2011, the report added that actual price levels will depend heavily on next year’s weather events and fuel prices.

For small countries that import the majority of food supplies, the reality will likely be much worse, according to the FAO’s State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011 report, released in October. These countries, many in Africa, are less likely to be able to insulate themselves from food-price volatility, which the report says is expected to continue in the future, due to climate change and increasing demand.

Source: Bloomberg, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, NPR, PRNewswire, The New York Times, Voice of America

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute, an internationally recognized water expert and a MacArthur Fellow.

Read his full bio…

A few years ago, with the support of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Pacific Institute produced a remarkable book of gritty, compelling black and white photographs taken by Gil Garcetti throughout West Africa. The photographs in Water is Key: A Better Future for Africa tell the story of the tragedy that comes from the lack of safe water and sanitation, but also the beauty and hope that clean water offers: the smile of a healthy child, the simple act of washing, and the joy of people working together as a community for the common goal of safe water. The books were given to community groups, non-governmental organizations, and others working on African water issues to help them raise awareness and funds for their efforts.

The book also includes four short essays on water by President Jimmy Carter, Dr. Mary Robinson, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. In honor of President Johnson-Sirleaf’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize, I reproduce her essay on water from Water is Key, here.

Essay of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, President of Liberia from the book Water is Key: A Better Future for Africa

“The people of Liberia know what it means to be deprived of clean water, but we also know what it means to see our children to begin to smile again with a restoration of hope and faith in the future.  When I took office, Liberia began to recover from years of neglect. Our people have brought clean water into the heart of Monrovia to children who have never known water from a tap. Efforts are underway to expand water projects as much as possible throughout the country.

Water is Key (2007). Photos by Gil Garcetti. Edited by Peter Gleick.

We know that most of our people lack safe water and sanitation, and these signs of progress are just the first step. We must accelerate our efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals. We didn’t start early enough, and we have a long road ahead. But the dreams of our people who have suffered and sacrificed so much are now achievable: to be able to live in peace, send our children to school, put a meal on the table for our families, get up in the morning, and go to a job that that enables them to feel like a part of society, and to have safe and reliable water. This is our challenge: to achieve these simple dreams that many people around the world take for granted.

We are moving forward. Our best days are coming. The future belongs to us, because we have taken charge of it. We have the commitment, we have the resourcefulness, and we have the strength of our people to share the dream across Africa of clean water for all.”

Originally published by Forbes on October 7, 2011.

Image courtesy United Nations

A malnourished child waits for emergency medical assistance from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), an active regional peacekeeping mission operated by the African Union with the approval of the United Nations. Somalia is the country worst affected by a severe drought that has ravaged large swaths of the Horn of Africa, leaving an estimated 11 million people in need of humanitarian assistance.
Vulnerability to diseases is also of grave concern – according to the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR, hundreds of Somali children are dying from a combination of acute malnutrition and measles.

More than half of Somalia’s population is now suffering from lack of food as famine spreads to the Bay region of the country, where food production has fallen 82 percent, according to Voice of America. The famine — officially declared in July — is due in part to a La Niña-induced drought that first hit the Horn of Africa in 2010 and has continued into 2011.

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern is a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon consisting of El Niño and La Niña cycles, and, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), although ENSO is naturally occurring, a warming climate may contribute to an increase in the frequency and intensity of El Niño cycles. This cycle is being classified as a moderate-to-strong La Niña, following 2009’s especially intense El Niño year.

La Niña is characterized by colder-than-normal water surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, causing heavy rains in Australia, Southeast Asia, and South America, while causing drought conditions in eastern Africa.

While drought still prevails in the region, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has reported that there should be near normal rainfall in the Horn of Africa by the end of this year. Though there is still the possibility of another La Niña, it is expected to be weaker than the current cycle. Either way — whether next year there is no La Niña, or just a weakened one — drought conditions will likely ease in the coming months, according to Voice of America.

The weakening of the drought, however, does not necessarily spell the end of the famine.

Food — if it becomes available — is difficult to distribute, and this is the challenge facing aid organizations, which have not lacked supplies as much as the means to get those supplies to people in need. Additionally, Somalia is still in a state of conflict, which will have a great influence on the future of its food supplies. The country’s government, though internationally recognized, is weak and opposed by a number of groups, including the Islamist al-Shabaab, which controls much of the country that has been hit hardest by the famine, the Guardian reported.

The political instability — and resulting inefficiency — also contributed to creating the crisis in the first place, WMO climate expert Rupa Kumar Kolli told Voice of America. Kolli said that meteorologists predicted the drought well in advance and warned policy makers in the affected countries, but they got little response because weather and climate information is often not taken seriously.

“Famines are man-made, whereas droughts are natural parts of the system,” Kolli said.

Government policies encouraging agricultural practices that better utilize water resources will be key to future food security in the Horn of Africa’s arid regions. According to Jeff Hill, director for policy at USAid, this means investing in pastoral livestock farmers, the Guardian reported.

“Livestock provides more food security than growing crops in many arid and semi-arid areas,” Hill said.

Unlike crops, livestock can be moved to water during the dry season’ but, currently, farmers often cannot move their herds freely, sometimes due to cultural and international borders, as was the case earlier this year in a dispute between two ethnic groups on either side of the Ethiopia-Kenya border. If they were allowed to follow the water, rural farmers could become more resistant to drought and famine.

Sources: Guardian; Voice of America

In more modern times, most disputes and conflicts over water are resolved peacefully and diplomatically. There are many examples of negotiations over water disputes and hundreds of important treaties between nations, which allocate scarce water, ensure pollution is reduced, and share information and data. The United States has treaties that cover water sharing on the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers with Mexico and the Great Lakes with Canada. Even the Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians have signed agreements over the intensely conflicted water resources of the region. And while these agreements are rarely perfect, they greatly reduce the risks of violence over water.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute, an internationally recognized water expert and a MacArthur Fellow.

Read his full bio…

But water conflicts still exist. And as populations and economies continue to grow, pressure on limited water resources will also grow. Because water is so vital for all human activities, from sustaining ecosystems and human health to growing food to making semiconductors, these pressures will raise the political value of water. Evidence already shows that such pressures can, and do, lead to violence.

In a last, desperate, and despicable attempt to prevent the liberation of Libya from decades of rule by the despot Muammar el-Qaddafi, his regime had just added to his list of international war crimes by cutting off water to Tripoli and other cities dependent on a massive water engineering project that was once Qaddafi’s pride and joy.

In the 1990s, Qaddafi’s regime put into operation “The Great Man-Made River” – a project to pump vast quantities of non-renewable groundwater from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer in the south of the country to the northern coastal dry cities. Costing over $30 billion, this system was designed to move over 6 million cubic meters of water per day, enough to satisfy the domestic needs of millions of people, expand agriculture, and satisfy new industries.

Early in the war, Libyan government officials expressed concerns about NATO attacks disrupting the water supply and Qaddafi even claimed that NATO was interested in stealing Libya’s water. The water pipelines that bring water to Benghazi and Tripoli and other cities often run parallel to many of the oil and gas pipelines and fighting around Ajdabiya, Sirte, and Benghazi threatened the water system.

But just this week, with the regime crumbling, it was Qaddafi’s failing government that apparently used water as a last, desperate weapon. According to UN reports and officials of the National Transitional Council, Qaddafi forces vandalized water pumps, cutting off water from the Great Man Made River to western Libya including Tripoli. If these reports are true, they are a violation of international law, which clearly states that water shall not be used as a weapon to deprive people of their basic needs, and a violation of the newly declared and legally binding human right to water by the UN.

Efforts should be made as quickly as possible to secure the water systems of Libya to ensure that the Libyan people continue to have access to safe water. And if these cutoffs are shown to be intentional, they should be added to the list of international war crimes now accruing to Qaddafi and his supporters.

Peter Gleick
(A chronology with hundreds of examples of violence over access to freshwater resources is available for readers interested in history here.)

Originally published by Forbes on September 3, 2011.

Image courtesy Physicians for Human Rights

Libyan forces loyal to Qaddafi have taken control of the operation center that supplies Tripoli with water from the Great Manmade River — the 2,820-kilometer (1,752-mile) network of pipes, pumps, and storage tanks that Qaddafi began building in 1984 — according to yesterday’s report by The National, an English-language newspaper in the United Arab Emirates.

The western half of the country is now without running water, according to The National, and international organizations have initiated relief efforts in the Libyan capital. Power cuts have disrupted the pumps running the water supply. Qaddafi’s forces have attacked water operation centers and still control two cities that are essential to operating the system. There have also been rumors that Qaddafi’s supporters have poisoned a reservoir, according to The National.

“Our staff were terrorized,” said Abdussalam Jehawi, a board member of the Great Manmade River Authority in Benghazi. The loyalists “stole their four-wheel drive vehicles, used machine guns, took all their food,” he told The National.

A back-up operations center in the eastern city of Sirte is also beyond reach. Sirte, Qaddafi’s hometown, is one of the few cities still held by troops loyal to the deposed leader.

A member of the rebel National Transitional Council told the Sydney Morning-Herald that the council was still trying to gain control over much of the country’s remote, rural southern region. He did not know of any plans for how to secure water supplies and oil facilities in that region.

The European Union has allocated $US 16 million for humanitarian needs. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) delivered some 113,000 bottles of water to Tripoli in the last week and is preparing to deliver 5 million liters (1.3 million gallons) by truck and tanker from sources in neighboring countries. An aid organization from the island country of Malta is sending a ship with 300,000 liters (80,000 gallons) of bulk water and 50,000 liters (13,000 gallons) of bottled water.

“UNICEF is responding to the immediate needs in Tripoli, but we remain extremely concerned about the situation, should there be a shortage of water in the coming days,” said Christian Balslev-Olesen, the head of UNICEF’s Libyan office, in a press statement. “This could turn into an unprecedented health epidemic.”

A UNICEF team is currently exploring alternative water supply wells within Libya.

The Great Manmade River provides billions of liters of water a day from 1,300 wells in the Sahara. Because substantial amounts of electricity are needed to move the water through the system, power cuts during the revolution have periodically put the water supply at risk.

Last week, during the first day of fighting in Tripoli, an 18-hour power outage cut new water supplies from flowing to the capital, The National reported. Now that they control most of the capital, the rebels are shifting their focus to the areas that regulate the water supply.

“This could be taken care of soon, if Sabha and Sirte are taken by the rebels,” Jehawi, the river authority board member, told The National. “Until then, there is not much we can do.”

Sabha, near the main water source for the Tripoli line of the Great Manmade River, is likely the last stronghold for Qaddafi, rebel leaders told Reuters.

Opposition forces have been fighting the Qaddafi regime since early this year, as waves of revolutionary action have rippled throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Last week, the Libyan rebels seized control of the capital for the first time.

For more about Libya’s Great Manmade River and how , see Circle of Blue’s Infographic: Going the Distance, From Ashgabat to Whyalla—10 Cities Pumping Water From Afar by intern Kelly Shea.

For more information on where water has instigated conflicts and where it became a target of war, see the Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology.

Sources: The National, Sydney Morning-Herald, Times of Malta, UNICEF, Reuters

Keith Schneider: Circle of Blue is a news organization that uses science, data, design, and collaboration and convening in order to produce solutions to our most important problems, one of which is water scarcity on the planet.

Our latest global project is Choke Point: China. China is getting dry at the same time as its energy demand is increasing at a momentum never before seen on the planet. We sent four teams of reporters to China; they went to 10 provinces, and we were there. We collected data and we produced a narrative in two parts — we had a good news story and a bad news story.

The good news story is that China has increased its water consumption by only 1 percent a year — 15 percent since 1995, the same years its economy grew eight-fold. And they did this by amassing an enormous amount of technology, public policy, entrepreneurs around water conservation and energy efficiency, and new technology. And they were able to convince their citizenry that as a nation they could begin to solve a significant problem of water scarcity.

The bad news story is that it’s a nation that’s growing in a way that has never been seen before. So everything that it’s doing isn’t going to solve the choke point that we identified for the first time for China — that in their northern and western provinces, which are their energy provinces and also their driest regions in the country — they are facing a very significant energy shortage, not because they don’t have the energy, but because they don’t have the water to develop the energy. And unless they solve that, it’s going to have global implications because anything China does today has implications for every nation on Earth, including the United States.

Video production by Travis Miller. Photos by J. Carl Ganter and Aaron Jaffe. Graphics by students at Ball State University.

While landowners took to Australia’s streets in mid-August to demand greater protection against the potentially lucrative coal seam gas industry, opposition groups in South Africa were mustering strength against shale gas exploration that, they say, could threaten the nationally significant Karoo region.

Australia and South Africa are among an increasing number of countries around the world that are reckoning with the prospects of developing unconventional fuels to bring revenue, to diversify energy sources, and to reduce carbon emissions.

But the rapid expansion of the unconventional fuels industry, along with the large volumes of water needed to unlock gas from underground coal beds and shale rock formations, have raised concerns over the potential damage to underground water aquifers, human health, food production, and the environment. These industries are also creating competition over land and water rights, which could spill over into political and social disputes.

Dewatering Australia: Coal Seam Gas v. Agriculture
In recent weeks, Australian farmers have locked gates on properties and organized protests against coal seam gas and coal mining companies trying to tap underground resources in prime agricultural lands.

The protesters, many of them farmers, worry that coal seam gas — also known as coalbed methane (CBM) extraction, which withdraws pre-existing water from the coal seam, thus reducing the pressure and allowing the methane gas to separate from the solid coal and to flow to the surface — might pollute the water resources for drinking and farming. They are demanding a moratorium on CSG drilling, until the health and environmental impacts of the process can be assessed further. The CSG “dewatering” process typically takes two years.

Around 2,000 yellow signs bearing “Lock the Gate” slogans were hung on farm gates throughout Queensland and New South Wales in mid-August, encouraging land owners to stand up to the energy companies, Sky News reported.

Protesters also gathered at a recent mining conference in Sydney on August 18, according to ABC News.

The recent events follow months of wrangling between farmers and miners over energy production, traditionally a very influential sector in Australia. The tensions also sparked political controversy earlier this month, when the Greens Party called for new laws to give stronger rights to farmers, enabling them to keep coal seam exploration rigs off their land, Reuters reported.

According to Australian legislation, the rights to below-ground deposits belong to the government, instead of to individual landowners, meaning that citizens have a hard time keeping energy companies off their property.

Meanwhile, Australia’s CSG industry — a major source for the country’s growing liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector – plans to build roughly $US 70 billion worth of LNG projects in Queensland state over the next seven years; a scenario that is also estimated to create thousands of new jobs each year. Exploration is also advancing in neighboring New South Wales, according to Reuters.

Fracking South Africa’s Karoo Region: Shale Gas Exploration in the Desert
Similarly, South Africa has been gauging the extensive risks associated with the potentially big economic benefits of proposed shale gas drilling in its Karoo region, a semi-desert area known for its stark beauty and indigenous plants; a region that is also believed to hold substantial deposits of shale gas.

Earlier in August, Yale Environment 360 reported that opposition to natural gas drilling is growing among farmers, landowners, and environmentalists in the country, amid concerns that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking – the process of injecting water, chemicals, and sand at high pressure into rock formations to free up the oil and natural gas trapped inside – will deplete and pollute the Karoo’s scarce water supplies.

The worry is that the poverty-stricken region will become the arid twin of the Niger Delta’s swampy mangroves, where foreign oil companies and long years of conflict have contaminated the Nigerian land and water.

In July, protesters chanted outside the Shale Gas South Africa Conference in Johannesburg, where Shell South Africa – just one in a score of companies eyeing shale gas in Karoo — was to discuss its fracking plans for the region.

Earlier this year, in February, South African farmers and environmentalists voiced a public concern over plans to look for shale gas. Then, in May, the South African government said it would conduct a comprehensive feasibility study of hydraulic fracturing before it decides on the shale gas applications in its Karoo region, and the government imposed a moratorium on the use of the fracking technique until that time. This announcement came on the heels of a number of policy decisions in China, Europe, and the United States that have set diverse agendas for shale gas drilling around the world.

Source: Australia Broadcasting Corporation News, Sky News, Toowoomba Chronicle, Yale Environment 360, Reuters