Hey, Water – Don’t Let Us Forget You In The Climate Whirlwind!

I’m willing to bet that you probably don’t think of “climate change” when you lift a glass of water to your lips several times a day! It’s not your fault—why would you, when the climate change folks are always going on about other things? Like the need to increase renewable energy, or increasing the use of electric vehicles, or the need to stop deforestation, or cutting back on the use of planet-warming fossil fuels, right!?

It’s a very crowded stage already, and there are lots of messages flying around thick and fast. So, it’s easy to forget that our water also has a big role in the Climate Story. In fact, it has many! 

Today, let’s look at drinking water specifically, focusing on adaptation and resilience. In a future Gup Shup, we’ll explore some interesting water-related concepts and vocabulary, and other water uses too, such as agriculture, manufacturing, and energy generation.

So, think back to the last drink of water you had today. Unless you happened to be out hiking in a pristine mountain area and you stopped at a crystal clear, ice-cold stream or lake, and unless you then filled your big (reusable) water bottle with the fresh, ice-melted water to see you through the rest of the hike… nice daydream, right? Well, sorry to wake you up, but if that was NOT your most recent drink of water today, then like all the rest of us, you probably had a ton of help with your glass of water. Most likely this was help that you may not have focused on. As it happens, a small army of people are at work day and night behind the scenes, to ensure that fresh, clean water reaches your tap, so that it’s always there and you don’t have to think about it when you reach out to turn it on.

Today, we will look at why business as usual is not an option (five extra points if you guessed it has something to do with Climate Change!), and consider a few examples of what is being done about it at some leading-edge utilities. We should also consider what we as individuals can do, to stop making things worse. Think of this as a set of special glasses, “climate change lenses,” helping you to see the climate change aspects of everyday life. Once you’ve seen the climate change angle, you’ll be able to decide what you want to do about it.

This Gup Shup looks at why many water treatment plants need to be upgraded (ADAPTED) and how they also need to be protected from increasingly frequent floods and weather disasters (increased RESILIENCE). The catch is that the present set-up can’t continue under “business as usual.”  Some financial investment is needed to upgrade and weather-proof whatever those water-folks do. This will cost public money and we need to have an “informed view” on what we think of that, when we go to the ballot box.

A few basic water facts to set the scene: 97% of the world’s water is in the oceans, salty and non-drinkable, or non-potable. We are all (nearly 8 billion of us on the planet!) sharing the 3% of the remainder, that is fresh water. Of this fresh water, 30% is locked up in icebergs and glaciers. The rest is partly surface water, in rivers, ponds, lakes and streams, and partly ground-water, i.e. locked underground, sitting still, but in an aquifer. Ground water is either deep or shallow, depending on the level of the water table due to the geological formation below your feet. 

Groundwater has to be extracted through bore-holes or wells, with pumps. Surface water also needs pumping in order to move it, but it is much easier and cheaper to access, and it is more easily replenished through the water cycle. 

Globally at least 1.5 billion people rely exclusively on groundwater extraction for their drinking water supplies, and fully 50% of the US population also relies on groundwater (although they have a water company that extracts it for them, unless they live in very rural areas). 

Most people in the world do not have a water company arranging for their safe drinking water through a network of pipes. This applies even to millions of people who live in urban areas of developing countries. They (or their women and girls, more accurately) have to carry heavy buckets and large containers over long distances, fetching water for their daily needs from the nearest wells, pumps, standpipes, rivers, or lakes.

These few containers of “raw water” will have to do for everyone’s washing, bathing, drinking and cooking needs. Most women and girls have to make the arduous journey (especially in rural areas) to fetch water at least twice a day because they cannot carry enough home on one trip, to meet the needs of all family members. So just having an infrastructure to upgrade in the first place looks like a good problem to have, relatively speaking!

Everywhere on the planet, our precious and dwindling surface fresh water supplies face three main kinds of risk (the first one is man-made, and not climate related, unlike the other two. That means we can do something about it NOW).  

• The first one is contamination of our water bodies with bacteria, viruses, pathogens, industrial chemicals, mining waste and run-off (tailings), animal waste, etc. In wealthy countries there is also poisonous runoff from too many hobby-gardening enthusiasts (with big egos!) who use chemical fertilizers and pesticides in their gardens.
• After contamination, the second risk to our planet’s freshwater supply is sedimentation, which is related to climate change. When topography changes due to increased soil erosion, there can be an increased flow of mud and earth into our surface water bodies like lakes and rivers. Before we can drink the water, (if we are fortunate enough to have treated and piped water), the “raw water” is cleaned at a water treatment plant. However, the equipment at those plants was originally built to handle and remove much lower historical levels of sedimentation (through a process called flocculation and then filtration). The levels of sedimentation and “nasty stuff” that finds its way into the surface water body today is often too much for these systems to handle. The problem is likely to get worse with more forest fires, hurricanes, and landslides. When tree roots are no longer binding the soil, it slides down towards the water bodies and vastly increases the so-called “total dissolved solids” or TDS that has to be taken out through various stages before it is sent to us by our water company (“source to tap”). 
• The third risk to a number of our planet’s precious few remaining freshwater surface water bodies, also climate-related, is salt water intrusion. This is particularly a risk for communities located near the coast. As sea levels rise, or the coastal land sinks (subsidence, which can also occur due to over-extraction of ground-water from underground aquifers), the sea water finds new underground channels through which to move inland. Or if there is a coastal flood, the seawater intrusion is perfectly visible and not underground. Seawater can destroy agricultural lands (because the majority of plants cannot grow in saline soil), and it can also enter the water tables if underground rock formations have become porous or cracked. These water tables can then no longer be used as a source for drinking water.

So, our freshwater reserves are PRECIOUS and limited, and need to be protected, and NOT WASTED. 

We just talked about losing freshwater at the source. There is another danger that we should not let our kids inherit. We are unfortunately losing large amounts of water to leaky underground pipes (in some US cities it is 50% and in some developing countries it is 65%). Fixing leaky pipes must be an immediate priority area in the management and reversal of our water wastage. 

We know that in many US cities the underground network of pipes to deliver drinking water is 70-80 years old and already past the end of its life (in some developing countries the leaky water distribution network is nearly 150 years old, as it was built during colonial administrations in the nineteenth century).

Meanwhile, this infrastructure continues to accommodate growth in freshwater demand, as population patterns change and demand mostly increases. The more that is put into a leaky network, the more is wasted. Hence the urgent priority to attend to our water infrastructure. 

A lot of public sector money will have to be spent to upgrade this water infrastructure equipment and climate-proof it, but that is the climate debt we owe our children. We cannot leave our kids with unusable or unfit critical infrastructure that cannot meet their drinking water needs in just ten or twenty years from now. Repairing and making our water infrastructure more resilient will create green jobs for us today, and leave our kids with safe drinking water in the future. 

How is this being done, in the very few places where it has already started? 

• Advanced water utilities are using climate modelling to figure out where the 100-year floodplain will be, and moving critical water-treatment related infrastructure out of the way. Otherwise, they are at least increasing the water-treatment infrastructure’s resilience by raising electrical equipment to an elevation that is 40-50 feet higher than it is located now. Another interesting approach is to build more artificial reservoirs at “safe locations” so that there is better control over the stored “raw water” in a concrete enclosure in order to reduce the three risks mentioned previously (1. sedimentation, 2. salt water intrusion, 3. contamination).
• Some coastal cities are diversifying their “water portfolio”, meaning their raw water sources, because they cannot rely on any single source alone. They are building a medium sized desalination plant to make ocean water drinkable, and they are simultaneously upgrading the capacity of their equipment to treat future “raw water” from both underground and surface bodies.

A quick mention of the difference between water treatment and waste-water treatment plants: the former pumps “raw freshwater” directly from a surface water body, moves it through pipes till it reaches the treatment plant, where the engineers and plant operators apply various chemicals and undertake mechanical processes such as sedimentation and other techniques (adding chlorine, ozone, etc.) to remove all harmful substances make it safe for human consumption. The tested, clean water is then shipped to numerous destinations in the water company’s service territory, through an elaborate network of underground pipes.  

Waste-water treatment plants try to clean up the water that comes back out of our buildings after we have used it for our showers, laundry, flushing the toilets, etc. Anything that goes into our sink and down the drain after we wash with it, is on its way to a waste-water treatment plant in wealthier countries which have a public sewer network. 

In some cities of the United States, the wastewater and sewage are mixed, carried away in a single pipe, and cleaned together in a sewage treatment plant. In other cities, the water and sewage are channelled back to the plant in separate pipes. This works well most of the time except when there is heavy rain or flooding. More on that in another Gup Shup, when we talk about “smart sewers” that have intelligent sensors connected to the internet, and algorithms that act like a traffic cop for the contents of the sewage pipes!

The idea of treating wastewater is that all fresh water is too precious to lose, no matter how unclean and greasy it is after you do the dishes!  So, if some waste freshwater can be recycled for non-human consumption purposes, such as agriculture, manufacturing, cooling of thermal power plants, washing your car, watering your lawn etc, then this re-captured wastewater should be recaptured and cleaned up and recycled to a re-usable grade. 

Quick preview of what we will talk about next week: how much water is in your coffee cup? You say about 300ml or about 8 ounces, right? What if I were to tell you it’s actually 136 LITERS or 34 GALLONS?  You can only see 300ml and the rest is hidden! But you do need to know about it! Stay tuned!

Till next week, Mohua

Photos by Chris Czermak, Nithin PA, Alessandro Oliverio, and Tom Fisk, from Pexels, and from The Africa Times.