In Texas, most water use goes for agriculture – about 75 percent – and the rest is split between industrial uses and drinking water. Ground water accounts for nearly a fifth of the state’s drinking water supplies yet groundwater is barely regulated. Given that set up, it’s easy to imagine the issues groundwater users are […]
Tired of worsening toxic blue-green algae in Lake Erie, the city of Toledo, Ohio fought back in a novel way by voting in favor of a Bill of Rights for the smallest Great Lake. The approved ballot measure requests an amendment to the Toledo city charter that asserts Lake Erie and its watershed hold the […]
As rivers swell and levees break apart, a huge swath of the country is experiencing unprecedented flooding in the Midwest and Great Plains. The combined effect of lingering snow from a blizzard and heavy rains made for a devastating effect in the Missouri River basin. The regional outlook doesn’t look rosy either. “This is shaping […]
Last year Mashable did such a good job of explaining the water crisis, that we are running it again this year on World Water Day. Around the planet, more than 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water and that number is expected to rise to 3 billion by 2050. There’s a lot that governments, corporations […]
Coal ash stored near coal-fired power plants is contaminating groundwater, finds a comprehensive report recently by Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice. Recognizing and quantifying groundwater pollution is important because more than one-third of people in the United States rely on aquifers for water supplies at home, school and work. Coal ash is the byproduct of […]
Think water-rich Britain is uniformly water rich with lush greenery throughout the entire region? Think again. The most populated and driest region – the Southeast, where London is located – might soon be facing water shortages. What? Water shortages in London, England? That’s right! No place is immune from drought. In 2018, England had six consecutive […]
According to the US Drought Monitor for the week of March 5, 2019, only a very small percentage of Northern California is in any sort of drought, which makes the California drought over, technically. The problem with that declaration, however, is that drought calculations don’t take aquifer levels into account. Given its [now in the […]
Although bottled water is not better or safer than most tap water in the United States – in fact, bottled water often comes from a tap – many people still buy into the myth that tap water is unsafe and they buy bottled water instead. This is an unnecessary and costly practice that few studies […]
Blue water supplies – those from rain water that flows over land and becomes surface water and groundwater – have been regularly studied and are fairly well documented. Green water supplies, however, aren’t as well studied. Our friend and the father of the water footprint concept Arjen Hoekstra and his colleagues have gone a long way toward […]
