We don't realize how good we have it in the United States. Turn on the faucet and clean drinking water comes out. Maybe not the tastiest stuff, depending on where you live, but safe and amazing compared to what you'll find (and won't find) in some countries.
Or maybe we haven't been paying close enough attention. Water isn't as plentiful and inexhaustible as you might believe, even in the United States. And climate change threatens to make the situation worse, according to a new report by Tetra Tech, a consulting and engineering firm.
Is your home on the list? The greatest risks to water sustainability are in parts of Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, says the report, done for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Great Plains and Southwest U.S. face extreme risks. In all of these areas, there could be limitations on water availability, or demand could exceed supply by 2050.
The estimates, which forecast dry days in more than 1,100 U.S. counties, are based on publicly available water-withdrawal data for different sectors of the economy, such as irrigation, power plant cooling, and municipal supply. Researchers also used climate projections from recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models.
The 1,100 counties listed make up more than one-third of all counties in the lower 48 states. Of those, the 400 at greatest risk are 14 times more at risk than under previous estimates.
Is your throat getting dry yet? You can check out county and state maps on the NRDC and TetraTech websites and view the maps in Google Earth, as shown above.
There's also a section on climate change impacts to crop production in the 1,100 at-risk counties, which total more than $100 billion.
This is another spin on an old story. It's one thing to say that it may be hotter in the shade in decades to come, due to human-induced climate change brought on by the burning of fossil fuels. It's another thing to point out that water also may be scarce.
Since water is essential to life, maybe that's enough of a reason for Congress to take real action to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and set an example for other countries to do the same. The only people who need to be concerned are those of us who drink water.
This concern over water is right on target. The solution is in the restoration of the forests. Having read the recent updates on US forestry policies, however, there is nothing there that says the forest areas will be expanded. Perhaps because many lands are in private ownership. Land owners must consider setting aside portions of their lands for trees.
Only the forests can help keep the water on the ground instead of up in the atmosphere to cause global warming. It is not CO2 that is causing global warming. It is the transfer of the waters from the ground to the atmosphere due to lack of forests.