A new book says Australia’s 20-year water trading experiment is sucking hundreds of millions of dollars each year out of the Murray-Darling Basin and directing water away from productive land.
Water flows from the Vaal Dam after several sluice gates were opened in February 2021. Heavy rains in the Gauteng province resulted in a spike in dam levels.
Deaan Vivier/ via GettyImages
Pipelines, dams, gadgets: does water management really need to be all about control and power? Adopting less masculine ideas and working with nature may be more prudent.
Wild swimmer Fiona Philp from Limekilns, Scotland took a daily dip in her garden pool during lockdown.
Iain Masterton/Alamy Stock Photo
With fewer people commuting, home water use changed radically overnight in March 2020.
An aerial shot of The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam reservoir filling up. Taken in 2020.
Photo by Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2020
Nile communities carefully monitored and recorded the river’s flow. Centuries later these records are still being used by water resource managers around the world to analyse unpredictable river flows.
It won’t be easy to get the 11 countries in the basin to agree to a plan that avoids chronic water shortages in the future. Good information sharing and technical cooperation are critical.
Given long-term forecasts for growing urban populations and an increasingly variable climate, local authorities will have to think about how best to encourage people to conserve water.
A court victory by an NGO against a South African municipality has laid bare the red tape and misgovernance that often burdens the process of issuing water licenses.
The tourism establishment could be depleting scarce water resources to the detriment of local communities.
GettyImages
Tourism ventures in a water-stressed region like southern Africa need to balance the needs of guests and staff with the needs of surrounding communities.
With no place to wash hands and nowhere to physically isolate, many poor Indonesians are incredibly vulnerable as COVID-19 sweeps through the global south.
Five capital city water storages fell over summer, and some appear to be facing dramatic long-term declines. Late drenching rains fell on southeastern Australia, but some unlucky centres missed out.