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Articles on Water policy

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Suburban development in Maricopa County, Arizona, with lakes, lush golf courses and water-guzzling lawns. Wild Horizon/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

What Arizona and other drought-ridden states can learn from Israel’s pioneering water strategy

Arizona is considering a multibillion-dollar desalination project to address its urgent water needs. Three water experts call for a go-slow approach and point to Israel as a role model.
Sign at a boat ramp on Lake Mead, near Boulder City, Nevada, Aug. 13, 2021. The lake currently is roughly two-thirds empty. AP Photo/John Locher

As climate change parches the Southwest, here’s a better way to share water from the shrinking Colorado River

A Western scholar proposes allocating water from the Colorado River based on percentages of its actual flow instead of fixed amounts that exceed what’s there – and including tribes this time.
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Water injustice runs deep in Australia. Fixing it means handing control to First Nations

First Nations people have almost no say in how water is used in Australia. The Productivity Commission’s latest report does little to address that.
India’s civil society has opposed engineering-based water management such as large dams, river linking and canal irrigation, for environmental and social reasons, but often ideological reasons. www.unsplash.com/@akshat_agrawal11

How India’s civil society can shape the country’s water policy

India’s civil society, which for the past 30 years has been critical of India’s water policies, now has the opportunity to drive the policy recommendations for water management.
Farmers rally outside Parliament House on Monday, December 2 2019. The most important drivers of farmer exit in the Murray-Darling Basin are changing climate, economics and demographics. Lukas Coch/AAP

Don’t blame the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. It’s climate and economic change driving farmers out

Our study predicts a further 0.5°C increase in temperature by 2041 will halve the current number of farmers in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin
The enthusiasm for recycling water that Australians had at the height of the drought little more than a decade ago has waned. Shaney Balcombe/AAP

When water is scarce, we can’t afford to neglect the alternatives to desalination

Cities relied entirely on conserving and recycling water to get through the last big drought. We now have desalination plants, but getting the most out of our water reserves still makes sense.
The more the market is willing to pay, the harder it is to regulate water use. Shutterstock.com

What happens to small towns whose water becomes big business for bottled brands?

Residents of a small Victorian town realised that delicious water can be a curse as well as a blessing, when they lost a legal battle to stop a local farmer shipping groundwater to a nearby bottling plant.

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