John Oliver discusses the water shortage in the American west, how it’s already impacting the people who live there. And what God has to say about it.
Partially comedy, but with much really interesting information.
Good read, water stress increasing worldwide, but only focused on the consumption side. The viewpoint missing for me is that we totally mismanage the water infiltration potential.
In many places the answer is yes – if we continue as we have done. The rest of the world could learn a lot from Denmark, one of the few countries to have reduced its water consumption.
Danish water consumption today is approximately 40 percent lower than it was in 1980, and it is still decreasing. Denmark managed to reduce the curve through a combination of greatly increased water prices (including green taxes), water saving campaigns, more water efficient technology in households and industry, and a reduction of water loss from the mains supply.
Green water — terrestrial precipitation, evaporation and soil moisture — is fundamental to Earth system dynamics and is now extensively perturbed by human pressures at continental to planetary scales. However, green water lacks explicit consideration in the existing planetary boundaries framework that demarcates a global safe operating space for humanity.
The green water planetary boundary can be represented by the percentage of ice-free land area on which root-zone soil moisture deviates from Holocene variability for any month of the year. Provisional estimates […] indicate that the green water planetary boundary is already transgressed.