‘Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink!’
This is the well-known quote taken from Coleridge, in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). If we stop for a moment to consider this – as if we were the mariner on that boat – and all about was water that we could not use or drink, how might we feel about our future?
For us in the UK, we live in a place with infrastructure which supplies us with good, clean, fresh water. We turn on the tap and it pours out. We probably don’t even give it a second thought.
Everything we do in life is reliant on water, for drinking, washing, food growth and production, construction and manufacturing. With the population due to hit 10 billion by 2050 the pressures on all our resources, are set to get worse, and access to water could become one of the biggest and most pressing problems associated with climate change.
With population growth, comes pollution growth, and the waste we produce can have detrimental impacts on the water available to us. Both freshwater supplies and underground aquifers are being affected. As water levels drop, the remaining water can become more saline making it unsuitable for drinking. Each year globally, more than 68 billion tonnes of topsoil is eroded at 100 times the rate it can naturally replenish itself. This soil, laden with biocides and fertilisers, ends up in waterways where it contaminates drinking water and protected natural areas downstream.
A Christian Aid report states that, London could run out of water within 25 years and British rivers could lose more than half their water by 2050 as cities around the world face growing risks from drought driven by the climate crisis.
Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, said “greenhouse gas emissions have caused rainfall patterns to change and temperatures to increase, making drought more common and more severe in parts of the world”.
As with many of the impacts of climate change, the poor and marginalised are most adversely affected. Jonathan Farr, senior policy analyst at WaterAid, says: Competing demands for water means that those who are poorer or marginalised find it more difficult to get water than the rich and powerful. Many governments and privatised water companies concentrate their provision on wealthy districts, and prioritise agriculture and industry over poorer people, while turning a blind eye to polluters and those who over-extract water from underground sources.
Professor Benjamin Sovacool, of Aarhus University Denmark, puts it even more starkly when he said, “There will be no water by 2040 if we keep doing what we’re doing today”.
So, what is it exactly that we’re doing?
Food
About 90 percent of the world’s water footprint comes from agriculture. One third of all croplands is now being used to produce feed crops for animals. The vast majority of the consumptive water used by the livestock sector is related to the production of feed, whereas only about 2% of it is water for drinking and servicing of the animals themselves. Intensive farming practices exacerbate this issue.
Fashion
The fashion industry is responsible for the consumption of 79 trillion litres of water annually, contributing to about 20% of industrial wastewater.
Electricity
People don’t often think of their lights, electronics, and appliances as major water consumers but energy production is the second largest consumer of freshwater resources in the world. Huge quantities of water are needed to cool the power producing equipment used to power our energy hungry lives.
Manufacturing
Every product that you buy, requires water during the manufacturing process. Approximately 39,000 gallons of water are required to produce a new car including tires, while it takes about 2,100 gallons of water to produce just one pair of leather shoes.
So, we can see from these examples that just our everyday lives are creating huge impacts on overall water usage. What might we do to reduce our water footprint (yes indeed you do have one!).
Water Footprint
Just like your carbon footprint – you also have a water footprint, and you can think about it in terms of looking at your general lifestyle choices.
Thinking about repairing clothes and goods rather than just clicking the button on another Amazon purchase will go some way to helping reduce your water footprint. Of course, shorter showers, turning taps off when brushing teeth etc are all good but maybe we all need to think a little beyond these measures to really make a difference.
Where your food comes from geographically and what food you are eating, will have major impacts on your overall water footprint. Meat and dairy products are high consumers of water with electricity fast fashion and manufacturing bringing up the rear. By making conscious choices about our food and even energy suppliers can reduce our personal water footprint in the same way as our carbon footprint.
Change is hard, so planning on doing one small thing will ease us into making permanent and green choices for a better greener more sustainable future.
If you would like to join us at the community garden in Westcott please feel free to come along. We are there every Saturday between 12-3 pm please find us on Instagram or on our webpage for green activities throughout the year.
References
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/18/are-we-running-out-of-water
https://www.concernusa.org/story/countries-with-water-stress-and-scarcity/
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019WR026995
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212371713000024
https://www.wri.org/insights/apparel-industrys-environmental-impact-6-graphics