The boom there has pumped a lot of money into the economy, but it’s also pumped out a lot of water.

Ica is a small, modest city near the Peruvian coast. But on a recent night, the city’s downtown plaza is hopping, including a small religious parade.

Click to enlarge (Illustration: Manya Gupta)

The bustle is largely due to asparagus. Ica is Peru’s asparagus capital. And the overseas demand for the long green spears has turned the place into a boomtown.

Locals say unemployment is near zero. Poverty has been cut in half. And there are unheard of amenities.

“There are now movie theaters as of only four or five years ago,” says Cecilia Blume. “And another thing that’s super important to me is the social revolution. There isn’t childhood malnutrition. Because in Ica, there’s work now for women – in agricultural packing.”

Blume grew up here and now runs a consulting company that works with asparagus exporters. And she and others in the business chalk almost all of this progress up to asparagus. But the picture here in Ica isn’t totally rosy.

Manuel Checa drives me straight up to the top of a sand dune high above the Ica Valley. Checa is part-owner of an agro-export group called Athos. They grow asparagus and pomegranates on about 1,200 acres of land.

He stops the car and points to some of the blocks of green that stretch out below us.

“This asparagus is 17 years old,” Checa says, “and it has produced very well. But now, we’ve killed 20 percent of our asparagus, and this year we’re killing 20 percent more.”

Checa’s company is pulling back from asparagus, after two decades of growing more and more of it.

“It’s causing a water problem,” he says. “We have to change crops.”

That’s because asparagus is a thirsty crop. And this part of Peru, along the coast, is basically a desert. The climate is great for farming, but the only water here comes when rains high up in the Andes wash through on their way to the sea.

That feeds local rivers and replenishes underground aquifers. There’s always been agriculture along these rivers. But never like today.

“The agro-exporters starting from 1995 intensively were overdrafting the aquifer, pumping water up and out,” said David Bayer, a local water activist who first came to Peru in 1964.

He says the Peruvian government, with the support of the US and the World Bank, pushed asparagus cultivation for export, irrigated with water pumped up from the aquifer, for only the cost of building and operating wells. Basically free water.

“And they also took over the equivalent, in the case of the Ica Valley, the equivalent of virtually 40 percent, 45 percent of the land,” Bayer says.

Over time, all that irrigation has caused the aquifer to drop lower and lower. That’s made it tough going for some bigger growers like Athos. And it’s become even tougher for small-scale farmers.

Dominga Rosario owns a patch of land in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Ica. She’s one of thousands of local residents here who farm mostly to feed their families.

She points out her corn, mango, avocado – they’re a little yellow right now. She’ll get a decent crop, Rosario says, but “you have to irrigate more. You have to invest more.”

That’s because as the aquifer has dropped, the soil above it has become drier. But irrigation can be expensive, especially when farmers have to keep digging deeper and deeper wells. Some can’t afford it. And they’ve abandoned their crops. The city of Ica’s municipal drinking water supply could even be at risk.

“I think there needs to be a solution as soon as possible,” Rosario says. “Because these companies, they’re preying on the aquifer. And when the aquifer dries up, our future will be uncertain!”

The situation has gotten so dire that it’s set off a scramble for solutions. For some, the answer to the water shortage is simple: just get more water.

Alfredo Sotil manages a commission that represents big agro-exporters here. He says that in the rainy season, as much as half the water running off the mountains flows into the sea. He and his colleagues want to capture that runoff behind new dams. “We’re interested in taking water and transferring it here, to continue generating this development,” Sotil says.

The dams could have the added benefit of generating electricity. But huge dams and water diversions are expensive, and they can cause their own environmental problems. That’s why others here are focusing not on getting more water but on using less.

Miguel Betín grows asparagus and pomegranates on a farm close to the Ica Valley. He recently installed a new, super-high-tech drip irrigation system designed by an Israeli expat who lives nearby.

“It works better than what we thought,” Betín says.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We were thinking we were going to save 40 percent water in the first year, and we saved 70,” he says.

Betín says his asparagus is just as good as the crop grown with conventional drip irrigation. And he says if the other growers in the region copy him, it could make a huge difference.

“If only the asparagus growers change, you’d save like 70 million cubic meters a year. So you have a big part of the problem solved there,” he says.

As for activist David Bayer, he thinks more farmers should follow the example of Manuel Checa: just stop growing water-hungry crops like asparagus. Or at least cut back on them. And he thinks some land should be taken out of production altogether for a while, to let the aquifer recharge.

Of course most growers aren’t interested in killing their golden cash crop. And the Peruvian government? It’s taken halting steps toward addressing the water crisis here. But some Peruvians say big changes may only come through pressure from a more formidable force: international consumers.

Stefan Bederski runs an organic farm about two hours from Ica. He says all the positive changes in agriculture in Peru recently – from better pay and working conditions to stronger environmental controls – all of them have come largely through pressure from overseas markets, especially in Europe.

“They have been really the ones who have forced the Peruvian agriculture and the companies to do the things right,” Bederski says. “We do have our own local laws and national laws, but there is no force to make them happen.”

Bederski thinks it might well be the same with the overuse of Peru’s water, that it’s the consumers overseas who will make the difference.

An international coalition of nonprofits is already trying to make that possible. They’re developing water use standards for Peru and around the world that will be like fair trade standards.

They say the effort will help consumers in Europe and the US learn more about the water impact of the asparagus and other imported produce at their local store, so they can choose products that don’t take a big gulp from someone else’s nearly depleted cup.

Actually we’re looking for the name of a strait. It’s the section of the north Atlantic that separates Canada and Greenland.

This waterway also links the Baffin Sea and the Labrador Sea.

These waters are downright chilly – and mostly covered with sea ice from December on to June. Northern mariners have long known about the fierce tides here.

There are old fishing villages and Inuit communities at the edge the strait scattered along the coasts of both southwest Greenland and northern Quebec.

Name this strait where floating icebergs mingle with shrimp fishing boats and bottlenose whales.

We asked you to name the body of water that separates Greenland from Canada.

Map indicating Davis Strait (Illustration: Wikimedia Commons)

In the agricultural belt of southeastern Australia, an area called the Murray-Darling Basin, farmers and ranchers are up in arms about a government plan to dramatically cut their water use. The plan comes after a 12-year drought and decades of river diversions took a huge toll on the environment.

But head almost a thousand miles to the north and it’s a very different story. In rural Queensland, farmers never had much access to water. And many seem happy to keep it that way.

Cattle rancher Angus Emmott, 48, has lived in the interior of northeast Australia his whole life. His closest neighbor is some 10 miles away. I asked him what he does if he needs to borrow some milk or sugar. His answer: “Well, we milk our own cow.”

It’s not just the solitude that makes this life challenging. The climate isn’t exactly cooperative either.

(Map: Wilderness Society)

“We get an average of 12 inches of rain a year, but that’s a bit of a misnomer, calling it an average, because some years we get as low as one inch,” said Emmott. “Other years, we just had 40 inches. You do get an average in the long run, I guess, but it’s very, very irregular.”

Creeks and rivers do run through this area. But in dry years, they’re channels of dust. And scientists say the dry years could become even more severe with climate change.

Emmott and other ranchers could build dams and store water for the lean years; that’s what they do in the rich agricultural areas 1,000 miles to the south. And that would make life a heckuva a lot easier. But Emmott doesn’t want to do that.

“These rivers out here, well the rivers across northern Australia, are in relatively good condition. And because these rivers are in great shape, we have the opportunity to actually be a little smart how we develop this country,” said Emmott. “We can actually make sure that we don’t damage the attributes to these rivers that make them so important.”

(Photo: Angus Emmott)

“It’s a pretty simple equation in the Australian Outback: the limiting factor on growth is almost always water,” said wildlife biologist Barry Traill with the Pew Environment Group. He took me on a drive through the Outback and explained how this area gets its scarce water. It’s a boom and bust cycle. Ranchers and nature rely on floods that originate 500 miles north in tropical Australia.

“The floods will come through and they’ll keep going for 500 or 800 miles south of us, and they’ll go into country, which has had, in many cases, no rain, no effective rain, for years,” said Traill. “You get these lush green flood plains, several kilometers wide, iridescent green floods plains, going thru these harsh, red sand dune desert. It’s an extraordinary contrast.”

Traill has been working with ranchers like Angus Emmott to protect this system and prevent the damming of these rivers. A coalition of ranchers and conservationists got a law passed by the State of Queensland in 2005 to permanently safeguard these waterways. But each river has to qualify on a registry first, one by one, to get protection.

Conservationists know they’re racing against the clock. According to government projections, Australia’s population could grow by more than 50 percent by mid-century.

Barry Traill (Photo: Jason Margolis)

“Ten years ago we got a taste of what could happen here,” said Traill. “There was a proposal to put in a very large cotton irrigation farm, but that was, fortunately, I think, very strongly opposed by local people.”

Traill says large-scale irrigation could’ve destroyed the delicate ecosystem here. That’s why it’s so important to get the rivers protected soon.

But not everybody here is happy about more regulation.

“It costs you more to actually get the paperwork done than it does to do the job,” said rancher Sam Coxon. His family has been grazing sheep in the interior of Queensland since his great-great grandfather walked 1200 miles here from southern Australia (Victoria) with his herd of sheep in 1887.

Coxon looks every bit the part of outback rancher, his cowboy hat pulled low over his blistered red skin. Coxon said he knows how to care for his land, and that includes needing to irrigate crops. “These small areas of irrigation, they’re to prevent more damage to this environment by weeds. We are about the environment. Without a good environment, we haven’t got a living,” said Coxon.

Coxon’s existing irrigation rights won’t be affected by any new regulations. And he can still buy more water on the free market. Still, he argued that if the river near him is protected, they’re essentially being legislated into forever remaining a dusty outpost. “Look, I mean, it’s the way the world is going. We’re becoming a nanny state,” said Coxon.

Sam Coxon (Photo: Jason Margolis)

“Regularly we get people from around the area who will all come down here and have a barbeque and sit around, watch the sunset and catch up with each other. We haven’t got the roar of traffic in the background. I don’t know, there’s just something about being out in the real bush,” said Emmott as he surveyed the scene with a contented smile.

But the ‘real bush’ as Emmott knows it is threatened. As climate patterns shift and Australia’s population grows, that ever-so precious resource – water – will undoubtedly become even more coveted.

UPDATE: The Queensland government announced the permanent protection of three rivers in western Queensland in December, 2011. Environmental groups say this will protect 10 million acres.

“I introduce myself from time to time as John Ward, New South Wales Farmers Association spokesman for water, and parent of children in this town that need employment.” Ward adds this last thought because he and many farmers in agricultural towns like Griffith are worried that there won’t be enough water to continue farming into the future.

Australia’s recent 12-year drought hit rural farm communities hard. Now the government may ask farmers, like Ward, to cut their water usage by another 30 or 40 percent. Ward said he and his neighbors will have none of it.

John Ward (Photo: Jason Margolis)

When asked if he is at war right now, Ward said “Yes, there’s no doubt. We are in the trenches.”

Ward lives in what is called the Murray-Darling Basin, the breadbasket of Australia, tucked in the southeast interior of the country. Think of the Murray-Darling like the American Midwest. Now imagine if the US government told farmers in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ohio that they’ve taken more than their fair share of water and now they will have to give a third of it, or more, back to the environment. That is roughly what’s happening here in Australia.

“We’re talking about the heart and lungs of our nation. And you can’t take the heart and lungs out of any person and expect them to survive,” said Mike Neville, the mayor of Griffith. The town of 26,500 produces wheat, rice, vegetables and 30 percent of Australia’s wine.

This area became the country’s major food-growing region through intensive management of its many rivers and tributaries. In the 1920s, the government began building large-scale dams and water diversions for irrigation. Farmers here say these engineering projects performed miracles, turning a largely parched continent into a food exporter.

(Click on the image to see the full size graphic. Illustration: Manya Gupta)

“Why would we want to limit the production capacity of an area like this? It just doesn’t make sense?” Neville said.

Neville said the proposed cuts will destroy farm communities at the whim of politicians and city dwellers. But others say the proposed changes were born out of necessity.

“The Darling river was running dry,” said Richard Eckard, director of the Climate Challenges Center at the University of Melbourne. Eckard said the impact of 12 years of drought on the region’s Darling River was made even worse by the irrigating practices of farmers upstream.

“You can’t extract that volume of water and have anything downstream. The ecology is pretty wrecked compared to what it used to be, there’s not much life. The fishing industry is all but gone,”
Eckard said.

Now the Australian government is looking to rebalance the distribution of water among farms, cities and the environment. It’s working body, called the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, is tasked with managing the Basin’s water in the national interest. And even though the 12-year drought finally broke last year, many climate scientists believe that it was a taste of things to come as climate change alters weather patterns here.

That is why some conservationists and scientists argue that the government’s new water plan still short-changes the environment. Tim Stubbs, a member of Australia’s Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, said the plan wouldn’t return enough water to the Darling River system — for the environment or other farms.

“I’m an engineer, so I see the river as a really functional machine, if you like,” Stubbs said. “And just like, say, your body, we need a certain amount in the river so it can be healthy, so we can continue to use it for irrigation in the long-term. At the moment, we’re using it in a way that will mean we will run it down and it just won’t be effective or useful for irrigation at all in the not-too-distant future.”

Stubbs said water cuts won’t decimate farm communities. And he points out that cutting agricultural water use by 40 percent won’t mean that 40 percent of farmers have to leave.

Cattle auction in Griffith, Australia. (Photo: Jason Margolis)

That big payout to farmers willing to get out of the business is part of close to $10 billion the Australian government is allocating to help farmers.

And Eckard said some farmers have already proven they could get by with less water during the drought.

“We’ve got the northern dairy industry for example, that went from over 100 percent water allocation down to less than 30 percent water allocation in the space of four years. By the end of the drought, they were producing as much milk as they were before,” he said.

Eckard said, yes, a lot of dairy farmers went out of business. But those that adapted to less water, are flourishing. Just try telling that to Murray-Darling basin farmers though.

I went to a cattle auction in Griffith and met people working in agriculture like Jim Jackson who transports melons. He scoffed at the idea that people here can get by with less water.

Jim Jackson (Photo: Jason Margolis)

Jackson’s attitude reflects a deep contempt for the Australian government, even though it made farming so successful here in the first place by building all those dams and water diversions years ago. Many people here don’t trust the government. They think climate change is a hoax and they see the proposed water limits as a mortal threat to their communities.

And the anger hasn’t been limited to words. Water spokesman John Ward said when a draft of a new water guidebook was unveiled, farmers in Griffith let the government know exactly what they thought of it.

“They piled it all up and burned it up in front of the cameras,” Ward said. “That’s what we think of it, just burn it. Take it away. Go back and come back with something we can live with and something that has balance in it.”

Of course balance is in the eye of the beholder. The final water management plan likely won’t be out until next year. And the final water allocation figures are still being hotly debated.

But it seems clear that one way or another, less water will be the new normal for many of Australia’s farmers.

Martín Mendieta has waited nearly 40 years to have running water.

Today I learned that the slogan is neither; for hundreds of thousands, if not millions (the numbers are in dispute), of Lima’s poorest inhabitants have either no running water at all or supplies that flow only a fraction of the day.

My day began early, in the San Martín district, a shantytown at Lima’s northern edge. There I met Martín Mendieta, a long-time inhabitant of the Cerro Candelario neighborhood. Like many Peruvians descended from the Quechua people who were ruled by Incas before Spain conquered Peru, Mendieta is small in stature but muscular in build. He paused from a construction chore breaking rocks to chat.

When Mendieta arrived from the countryside in the mid-1970s he built a home on the stony hill where he still lives. Whether he looked to the west toward the sea or the east toward the Andes, he saw hardly anyone on the flats below his perch. The land there was either completely unused or sparsely farmed. He excavated a shallow well alongside his modest house. But the water table fell in time, and its contents became inaccessible.

Meanwhile farmers and shepherds from the highlands, some fleeing communist guerillas, others drawn to the allure of city life, populated the flats with what Peruvians call “human invasions.” They built sturdy brick homes at the foot of Mendieta’s rampart-like hill. Now about 150,000 people live in four contiguous neighborhoods there, none of which has running water.

Mendieta says that he and his neighbors gained the stature of a community worthy of receiving city water around 1988, and they petitioned the government to hook them up. After years of petitions and protest marches, the utility Sedepal finally built a cistern for the community that looks like a giant aspirin on top of a nearby hill. But that was in 2008 and the tank is still dry.

In the meantime, anyone in the area who wants water has to buy it from a truck. This morning I watched as a squadron of blue Sedepal tanker trucks careened through San Martin’s uneven dirt roads, tooting horns and ringing bells to alert customers. Put one or two Soles (about 50 cents) into the outstretched hand of a truck driver’s assistant and he’ll fill your barrel from the end of wide hose suitable for a fire truck. Activists I consulted complained that the water is about 20 times more expensive, and far less clean, than the same thing when piped.

As I wandered through Ex Fondo Naranjal, one of the four waterless communities I visited, backhoes scraped up buckets of dirt from the roads, digging square holes for sewer connections. The activists I talked to said that water pipes had already been installed. They said the utility promises it will pressurize the pipes later this year.
Mendieta, whose house sits on an imposing rock mound, says he hasn’t gotten such pipes yet. Digging trenches there are difficult, he says, giving Sedepal, his adversary for so many years, the benefit of the doubt. He’s optimistic that Sedapal will fill the community’s cistern soon, and after nearly 40 years even he will have running water in his home.

Next week I’ll speak with glaciologists who question whether, regardless of how many people have taps, Lima will be able to keep its promise of water for all. As global warming shrinks the country’s glaciers, the country might simply not have enough water on its dry western coast to match the increasing demand.

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

A cliff of crumbly soil impregnated with small stones towered above us, rising straight up about 200 feet to the neighborhood of Chorillos. Chorillos means “trickle,” a name derived from springs that once spurted from the ground and dribbled down the cliff. So impressed were inhabitants of this desert city with the lush vegetation watered from the steady spurts of natural irrigation, bearding the cliffs, that they named the area the Costa Verde or, green coast. Today, though, the cliff face is mostly bare, green only in artificially irrigated patches.

In Chorillos I interviewed the civil engineer Marcos Alegre Chang, director of the Center for Eco-efficiency and Social Responsibility. Chang oversees several programs to encourage water conservation. He explained that Lima is facing serious water shortages, which will only get worse.

Using a white board with black and red markers he showed me the simple math that proves his point. The entire city of Lima gets about 21 cubic meters of water per second from two sources, the Rimac River, which supplies 15 cubic meters per second and deep wells from which the balance is pumped.

This amount of water is pitifully small to meet the needs of 9 million people. The only desert city comparable to Lima is Cairo, which draws water from the Nile, a river with a flow 100 times greater. Lima is growing rapidly. Yet sources of water are becoming scarcer. Chang said the water table in Lima is plummeting about 5 feet a year. It was this over-harvesting of ground water that turned the Green Coast brown, he said. It will also soon make some drinking-water wells fallow.

The Rimac’s paltry contribution to Lima is also in danger of declining. An official at the city’s water utility explained to me that during the dry season, when little rain falls in the western slopes of the Andes, the Rimac relies on water held in reservoirs high in the Andes to provide sufficient flow. But melting glaciers and changes in precipitation could staunch flow into these man-made lakes.

The utility has proposed a variety of public works projects to make up the difference, such as an enormous tunnel under the Andes to divert water from the Amazon Basin to Lima. Marcos Alegre Chang says he thinks the city should improve water efficiency first, with low-flow toilets and the like, before blasting tunnel and building dams.

I’ll be interviewing more officials in Lima in the coming days to judge for myself which if any of these solutions could avert a water crisis in Lima’s future. First, tomorrow, I’ll fly over the Huaytapallana Glacier, one of the fastest retreating glaciers in Peru. I’ll report back here what I see.

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

About three quarters of these glaciers top Peruvian peaks providing the South American country with a natural resource of immense value and justifiable pride. But Peru’s glaciers, like most glaciers in the world, are melting at an alarming rate. The Peruvian Meteorology and Hydrology Service say that the country’s glaciers have lost about 20 percent of their volume since 1970.

The American glaciologist Lonnie Thompson once told me that he thinks he’ll live to stand on the bedrock that today holds up the world’s largest tropical glacier – the Quelccaya Ice Cap near Cuzco, Peru. He gave me this disheartening forecast in 2006 as we stood together atop Quelccaya, with several hundred feet of ice separating us from that rock foundation.

Today I visited another Peruvian glacier, topping a mountain known as Huaytapallana, and famous not for its size but the rate at which it has shrunk. A Peruvian government official reported earlier this year that studies of old photographs show that the surface area of the Huaytapallana glacier shrunk by 50 percent between 1986 and 2006. This visit was much briefer than my earlier trip to the Quelccaya, which involved a daylong jeep ride and two days trekking on foot, but grueling in its own way.

The visit began in the city of Pisco on the runway of a military base, which also hosts a small commercial airport. I met my pilot, Cesar Pareja Lopez, at the side of his two-engine Cessna. Normally Lopez flies a special photographic camera for Horizon Air, a firm that produces topographic maps. I was anxious to examine the hatch in the plane’s belly where Horizon mounts its optical gear, because I relished getting clear pictures of the glacier through the same hole.

I’ve taken many pictures from airplanes before but poor quality glass and plastic windows have always robbed the photos of their soul. However, Lopez hadn’t been informed that I wanted to shoot through the floor; he thought I was just wanted a tour, seated and belted safely in a seat. He said that if he opened the hatch, the plane would be cold and that we’d have to wear oxygen masks.

When these arguments didn’t dissuade, he said that I might fall out. Reluctantly, and with persuasion from my translator Dado, Mr. Lopez agreed to unscrew the metal lid covering the hole when it’s not in use. He gave me a form in triplicate absolving Horizon Air of responsibility if anything bad happened, and had me sign and ink a fingerprint on each page. I crawled into the Cessna’s hold and donned a rubber mask and noise-canceling headset.

At first I was afraid of the opening into empty space about the size of a basketball hoop. But soon I had convinced myself that it was smaller and no more scary than the trap door of my childhood tree house; except that this perch was more than two miles above the ground.

I started taking pictures sitting on my rear end, straddling the hole between my legs. But my back got sore and my lens was too far inside the plane. I lost my fear (or, some might say, my mind) quickly. By the time I reached Huaytapallana, near the city of Huancayo, I was lying on my tummy sticking my head nearly into empty space.

Clouds enshrouded the glacier when we arrived, after a cruise of an hour. I had pulled on my winter fleece as the cabin cooled. Mr. Lopez made several passes over the summit, chasing rents in the clouds through which I might snap a clear shot.

Each time he banked the plane and turned the aircraft on its side, he hooted loudly with excitement. My stomach grew queasy and I wondered if I’d get limp enough to slip out of the plane if I passed out.

In the end, my best shot was not straight down through the opening after all, but through a window from the side, as Mr. Lopez paralleled Hyallatapalla’s spine. The mountain’s white mantle of ice impressed me. But I could also see many black patches of rock like holes in a tattered tablecloth. Had these spots been white last year? Five years ago? I don’t know. I hope to find out, though, when I meet one of Peru’s leading glaciologists later this month.

One more thing: If you find a black Nikon lens cap in the desert somewhere between Huaynaco and Pisco, Peru, it’s mine.

Daniel Grossman reports on climate change for The World. His multimedia work on science and the environment has been featured on PRI, NPR, National Geographic Online, The New York Times, Discover Magazine and Scientific American, among other outlets.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll explore a question that is easy to state but hard to answer: how will the Peruvian capital respond to decline of its chief source of water as its population grows and the demand for the resource grows. I’ll talk to officials at many government agencies and visit shantytowns that have waited decades just to gain running water. I’ll circle low in a prop plane over Huaytapallana, a glacier that has suffered some of the most startling losses of ice.

There are no simple solutions to Peru’s challenge, and no guarantees of success. I will explore several ideas, some hopeful, others fanciful. I’ll join glaciologist Benjamin Morales on a research expedition to study how glaciers might be insulated against melting with a coating of sawdust. Entrepreneur Eduardo Gold will show me his work trying to cool mountaintops and regrow glaciers by painting summits white. And I’ll see billboard-size fog catchers springing up on sand dunes on Lima’s outskirts. Although it almost never rains there, heavy fog blankets the region for about half the year and these simple devices are already capturing precious trickles and easing the city’s problems slightly.

Please join me on my travels. I’ll post entries daily about who I’ve met, what I’ve seen and what I’m thinking. I’ll post a photo or two as well.

Groundwater contamination around the Fukushima plant reported in Japan (Photo: Roquai)

Anchor Marco Werman gets the latest on Japan’s nuclear crisis from The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson. Extremely high levels of radiation were found today in groundwater under the plant. Download MP3

• IAEA Fukushima nuclear accident update log
• Important Information from Japanese Government

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World. Japan and France today promised to lead an international effort to write new global safety rules for nuclear power plants. The two countries are among the most dependent on nuclear power, and the goal is to avoid a repeat of this month’s still unfolding disaster at Japan’s Fukushima plant. In Fukushima today the struggle to contain the disaster continued amid more bad news about the spread of radioactive compounds. The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson joins us again. Peter, we’ve been hearing more today about high levels of radioactivity in water around the reactors.

Peter Thomson: Yeah, Marco, the latest news just in the past few hours is that the plant’s owners have found extremely high levels of radioactive iodine in groundwater about 15 feet underneath one of the reactors. The company measured those levels at roughly ten thousand times what the government considers safe. We’ve heard in the last week that similar levels of contaminated water have been found in concrete trenches and tunnels under the plant. But this is the first indication that radioactive water has actually leached into the ground itself. Company officials say they don’t believe that any drinking water supply has been contaminated, but of course, groundwater moves around, sometimes in unpredictable ways. So even if that assurance is valid now, it might not be for long. I think it is safe to say that this is a cause for concern and something that officials are going to have to watch very closely. I should mention that iodine-131, which is the stuff they found in the groundwater, decays relatively quickly. So, the amount may dissipate quickly, but of course the crisis is far from over. So the flow of radioactive water from the ground may continue.

Werman: And we’ve also been hearing about very high levels of radiation in seawater, not just groundwater but seawater near the plant.

Thomson: Yeah, levels just offshore from the reactor were measured this week at more than four thousand times the level of health concern. And this is both iodine and radioactive cesium, which persists in the environment a lot longer – for decades instead of days. In some ways this is less of a concern because there’s less chance of people coming into direct contact with this water. But of course, contamination of the food chain is a real fear. The Japanese eat more seafood than just about anybody else and a lot of that still comes from local waters. So this really could affect local fishing communities even if the actual radiation itself dissipates fairly quickly.

Werman: So Peter, a simple question: how is this radiation getting out? Do they know yet?

Thomson: Not exactly, it seems. But it’s strange. There seems to be sort of an element of surprise to all of this from the company and the government. But of course, emergency workers have been spraying four of this plant’s six reactors with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water for almost three weeks now. It really shouldn’t be a surprise that some of the water is finding its way out. There’s a sort of Oops! factor this week as we start to see this happening, but I’m not sure that it should be much of a surprise. Which is not to say that they had many other choices in this case. They had to do what they could to keep these reactors and the spent fuel pools from overheating once the cooling systems failed.

Werman: Meanwhile, Peter, we’re also hearing that that ring of significant contamination from the plant seems to be spreading. There was a report yesterday of high levels in at least one location 25 miles inland from Fukushima.

Thomson: Yeah, the International Atomic Agency is reporting that total radiation from both iodine and cesium found in one small village was high enough that the Japanese government should consider expanding its current evacuation zone around the plant. The government said today there is no need to do that and residents should remain calm. As far as we know, this was an isolated finding but it does show the movement of radioactive stuff from these plants is extremely unpredictable. And almost three weeks into this crisis, officials are still struggling to get the situation under control and to figure out how they might contain and clean up the highly radioactive stuff on-site, in the long run. One other thing, Marco, there were a couple of other interesting developments today in response to this disaster, outside of Japan. French officials said they might delay construction of the first of their new-generation nuclear plants, pending a safety review. And one of China’s official news outlets is reporting that, amid the global jitters about nuclear power, China may double its target for new solar electricity capacity in the next five years.

Werman: Interesting reactions. The World’s environment editor, Peter Thomson. Thank you for the update.

Thomson: Thanks, Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Watch the original story on FRONTLINE/World
• Watch a preview of the update on FRONTLINE/World

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DAVID BARON:  I’m David Baron and this is The World.  Here’s an idea to help impoverished people in Africa.  Build a water pump into a children’s merry go round.  The more the kids move the merry go round in circles, the more clean drinking water fills a tank.  Then, install thousands of these pumps in villages across Africa.  Well that was the idea behind the Playpump.  Amy Costello reported on the Playpump project for our program five years ago.  Here’s an excerpt from her story filed from a village in Mozambique.

AMY COSTELLO:  Kids run in a circle and push a merry go round faster and faster.  Those who are seated on the ride get dizzy from the speed; laughing and giddy from the force of gravity.  These kids are having so much fun they don’t seem to realize they’re working.  Then again, that’s the idea behind the Playpump, a merry go round with a mission.

BARON: That was reporter Amy Costello reporting on the Playpump in 2005.  It seemed like a great project, but things didn’t go as planned.  Amy Costello went back to Mozambique where the Playpump was rolled out to do a follow up report for the PBS television program “Front Line World”.  Amy Costello joins us from New York.  Now Amy, after you did that original story for our program and also for Front Line World, the idea really took off.  It was embraced by the wealthy and the famous.  Tell us what happened.

COSTELLO: Well yeah, it was an outcome I could have never expected back in 2005 when I did that story for your program, The World, and later that year for the PBS television program, Front Line World.  In 2006, just a year later I was invited to attend the Clinton Global Initiative Conference.

BARON: So that’s part of President Clinton’s Foundation?

COSTELLO: That’s correct, his annual meeting that he holds in New York every year with world leaders, and especially some of the biggest donors around the world trying to commit to resolving some of the world’s great crises.  That year, in 2006 they took on the water crisis and announced a 16.4 million dollar pledge to Playpump to roll out the technology in several African nations.

BARON: Wow.  So this really was a big push to get these installed?

COSTELLO: Absolutely.  By 2010 they wanted to up the amount that they were going to put into Playpumps to 60 million dollars, installing 4,000 pumps and potentially bringing drinking water to millions of people in Africa.

BARON: Sounds terrific.  So you went back to Mozambique and what did you find?

COSTELLO: I found pumps that were broken and/or were not working at the sites that they had been selected to work at.  So I visited a rural community in Mozambique whose Playpump had been broken for six months.  So they were without a drinking supply.  They had to walk 40 minutes to the next village in order to get their water now, which was putting additional pressure on that community.  They resented the 150 families that they were now having to share their water source with.

BARON: So actually in a case like this, the installation of the Playpump displaced their former source of water?

COSTELLO: Exactly.  I think one of the lessons learned in this roll out is that the Playpump should be installed in places where there isn’t water already.  In many instances in Mozambique for example, Playpumps were put over existing water sources, usually the traditional hand pump that had been there.

BARON: Well now you spoke to the man behind the Playpump project, he’s a South African named Trevor Field and here’s what he had to say about the broken pumps.

TREVOR FIELD:  We might not have been 100% fixing all of the pumps all of the time.  But the majority of the pumps are working, way more than the majority are working, 80% to 90% are working 100%.  And the rest of them will get attended to.

BARON: Now do you buy those numbers?  Are most of the Playpumps, the vast majority, still functioning?

COSTELLO: I kind of have to take his word on that.  I did raise some concerns with him that whether he has a good handle on maintenance or not.  Having said that, and having worked as a reporter in Africa for several years and lived there for six years, I can appreciate how difficult it is to maintain a technology in rural places.  And 1,500 of them no less.  So I think he’s got a huge challenge and he does have some implementing partners that he’s working with who say they are happy with his maintenance and the way their pumps are operating.  But it’s difficult to know when he says 80% or 90% of them are working if they are.  And as you know I go in my story and I visit one school where there isn’t water being stored in the tank and he didn’t seem to be aware of that.

BARON: So do you still think that the Playpump is a good idea?  Was this a good idea that perhaps was rolled out too fast and without enough forethought?  Or is there some fundamental problem with the technology, the concept?

COSTELLO: I don’t think there’s a problem with the concept itself.  I think that the largest lesson learned here is that it’s an appropriate technology in a very specific situation, which is at large schools where the children are big enough to play on the pump and that they’re using it enough during the day to pump sufficient water for the needs of the school.  It is not appropriate technology for very small children, not is it an appropriate technology for very small schools.  Most people agree now too, it should not be the primary source of water for anyone.  It’s a great secondary source of water for people.

BARON: Well reporter Amy Costello’s investigation into what happened to the Playpump project airs tonight on the PBS show Front Line World.  Thank you Amy.

COSTELLO: You’re welcome David.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Cienega de Santa Clara wetland, Sonora, Mexico.

Columns of moist air hover above still water in the Cienega de Santa Clara, mirroring the desert sky. The wetland is an oasis in dry northern Mexico, a haven for birds and fish, some endangered.

“The Cienega is the most important wetland in the Colorado River delta.”

Francisco Zamora Arroyo spends his workdays on the Cienega navigating sliver thin channels that snake through islands of yellow cattails. He’s a biologist from Arizona, who monitors the status of water and wildlife across the wetland’s 63 square miles.

“It’s a perfect habitat for many species of birds and it’s located on a migratory corridor, so it’s even more important that way.”

But the Cienega is also an accidental oasis. It was created 33 years ago by the diversion of polluted agricultural runoff from farms across the border in the US. Now, though, with water growing ever more scarce in this part of the world, the US wants to keep that runoff and recycle it. That’s put the Cienega’s future in question, and made it a symbol of the growing water conflicts in the border region.

Water flows into Mexico at San Luis Rio Colorado through a gap in the border fence

Allocation of water from the Colorado River and Rio Grande is regulated under a 1944 US/Mexico treaty. The two countries have agreed to renegotiate parts of the pact. And under a trial run this year, the flow of wastewater from Arizona’s farms into the Cienega will stop. Instead, it will go to a desalting in plant in Yuma, Arizona.

“That would free up 100,000 acre-feet here in the US and that could be used for cities and farms in the US.”

That’s University of Arizona geoscientist Karl Flessa. 100,000 acre-feet is enough water to supply 400,000 households in the US southwest. The Yuma plant will remove the salts that have leached into the water from local farmland and funnel it back into the water supplies of the growing cities of Phoenix, Las Vegas and San Diego.

“And we would still meet the treaty obligations to Mexico.”

That’s because the US says it will replace the water that now flows to the Cienega. But it hasn’t said how. That worries people concerned about the Cienega. It also worries Mexican farmers.

Farmer and naturalist Juan Butron Mendez

Juan Butron Mendez irrigates seven acres of wheat with the last traces of Colorado water as the river dries up in Mexico. He’s not happy with its quality, but he says it’s better than no water at all. Butron is also a naturalist working to save the wetland. He says the plan to keep that water is the latest example of the US giving Mexico short shrift on Colorado water. The US counters that Mexico violates its water treaty obligations as well. Butron says it’s time for the countries to cooperate, as the treaty mandates.

“Yo creo que si tenemos un tratado para recebir agua de buena calidad..”

He says competing needs can be met by leaving fields fallow on a rotating basis on both sides of the border. Butron also wants the US to use its own ground water to bolster urban supplies – not the wastewater currently sent to Mexico.

But that ground water is already spoken for as well; It’s used to irrigate vast fields across the Southwest. And US farmers have been assured that their water supply won’t change under a new treaty.

Those major questions, of which side will give what, remain unresolved. So for now, supporters of the Cienega de Santa Clara are pinning their hopes on smaller, local efforts to save water.

Like his friend Francisco Zamora, Osvel Hinojosa spends a lot of time on the Cienega. He’s a biologist and a member of the Mexican delegation negotiating with the US.

“We’re lucky that there are people on both sides of the border wise enough to say, ’We need to stop how we’re doing things so we have water for the future.”

In Tucson, Arizona for example, developers will soon have to supply half of the water used in landscaping from harvested rainwater. Across the border in Nogales, Mexico, watering lawns is only allowed on certain days. And a growing number of people on both sides are recycling “gray water,” for example using water from dishwashers and laundry machines to water their lawns or wash their cars.

Farmer Butron and Francisco Zamora Arroyo (right)

“And to me, this is it. If we cannot reach agreement & secure water for different areas including the Cienega, I’m not sure we’re going to have another opportunity in the future. We’re at a key moment in time where Mexico and the US can make a difference, not only in the short-term but the long-term.”

Both sides say they hope to strike a new agreement within 2 years. Neither side will agree to any specifics in a reworked treaty before analyzing the results of the Yuma Desalting Plant’s trial run In May. With nowhere else to go, the fate of the wildlife that depends on the Cienega de Santa Clara hangs on the outcome of the negotiations.

For The World, Lorne Matalon, San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico

• Lorne Matalon’s Mexico stories
• Environment coverage on The World

• Photo gallery for this story

A dry section of the Santa Cruz River near Tucson, Arizona

San Lazaro, Mexico – population 600 – its on the floor of a remote valley crisscrossed by warrens of paths carved into the boundless Sonoran desert. It’s where the Santa Cruz starts wending its way north toward the U-S. And it’s where 20-year-old Arturo Alvarez leads a group of young people working on a restoration team. ‘We’re watching bird migration patterns,’ Alvarez says. The group is known as Los Halcones– the Hawks-and it’s also monitoring the river’s temperature, and the health of the vegetation lining its banks.

Less than a decade ago, little took root here. The protective underbrush and cottonwood and mesquite saplings had been trampled by cattle and horses. But Los Halcones have fenced off two miles of the river and saplings are now abundant.

“The work done here is to preserve the river,” says Alfonso Gonzales, a baby-faced, 44-year-old sheep farmer with grizzled hands that speak to a life on the land. He collects Los Halcones’ data shares them with the Tucson, Arizona-based Sonoran Institute. The groups are key parts of a bi-national effort to salvage a river crucial to both countries.

Gonzales says,” I believe we’re doing our part in this region of the planet. And I think others should be contributing to the planet wherever they live.”

Alfonso Gonzales, who works with Los Halcones, points to a flock of birds

Los Halcones also shares its data with the International Boundary and Water Commission, the bilateral agency that works to resolve water problems along the border.

Agronomist Gilberto Solis Garza is an advisor to the Commission. He also works with Los Halcones and the Sonoran institute. Solis says the Santa Cruz is a symptom of stress on the border region’s water supply.

“And that is why the effort by both Mexico and the US to improve El Rio Santa Cruz is so important. Farmers, ranchers, industry and families – they have all taken too much water. And water is not an infinite resource even though people think the supply will never end.”

Just a few miles north of San Lazaro, the supply does end as the Santa Cruz passes through the crowded border region. But not far beyond that, in the US, the river makes a dramatic comeback.

“Turn is approved to the south. Runway 6. Right. Cleared for takeoff. Roger that. 8. Delta-Delta.”

From less than a thousand feet up, pilot and conservationist Dan Meyer points out a stretch of river where a sun-bleached ribbon of sand is suddenly replaced by lush green ribbons of cottonwood, willow, and mesquite trees.

“Where we are now you can see a very healthy part of the river.”

But it’s a bit of an illusion…

“What we’re seeing is groundwater from what’s being used in Nogales, Mexico.”

The water on this stretch of the Santa Cruz comes from a wastewater treatment plant. The plant is in the US, but it treats sewage piped underground from Mexico. Biologist Amy McCoy of the Sonoran Institute says the cross-border wastewater transfer is helping revive a major part of the river and the local ground water.

“The effluent flows through the stream bed & it infiltrates into the groundwater tables. As it infiltrates, it’s cleaned and filtered by the soil of the river & the roots of the trees. It returns to the aquifer and ultimately becomes drinking water again.”

McCoy says pressure on the Santa Cruz is growing, as the river is squeezed between increasing demand and a likely further drop in rainfall due to climate change. That means this kind of recycling is the wave of the future.

“So our options are to adapt, and on the Santa Cruz River one of the ways that we can do that is by looking at ways to re-use water to meet the needs of both humans and nature.”

But it’s not a sure thing that the cross-border wastewater deal will continue. Nogales, Mexico has threatened to stop sending its effluent to Arizona unless it gets paid for the water. Negotiations are now underway. One American negotiator hopes a new deal will fund an upgrade of the Mexican city’s run-down water system.

Back in Mexico, rancher Ventura Rivera Medina lives on a tributary of the Santa Cruz; He might benefit from such a project. But he’s not waiting.

Rancher Ventura Rivera Medina

Working with the Sonoran Institute, Medina has built 3-foot-high rock walls-he calls them mini-damns–with his bare hands to capture and channel precious rainwater. He uses what he needs and diverts the rest back into the river. Rivera says ranchers on both sides of the border need to take the initiative to conserve water and restore the Santa Cruz.

“We’re trying to show everyone that what we’re doing here works,” he says. “But we really need both gov’ts to support this work because ranchers don’t earn enough do it by themselves.”

Negotiations on a new water deal that could bring more government support for the restoration effort are progressing slowly, while the Santa Cruz continues to live its two lives; As a dried out skeleton of a river and a restored waterway venerated by a new generation of river activists on both sides of the border.

• Photo gallery for this story

• Sabri Ben-Achour’s photos from Haiti
• Sabri Ben-Achour on Haitian self-reliance (Jan 26)
• BBC coverage of the Haiti earthquake
• BBC picture gallery from Haiti

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston.  A Haitian judge said today he plans to release 10 Americans charged with trying to take Haitian children out of the country.  Meanwhile, a month after the earthquake hit the European Union says it will provide shelters that can withstand heavy rains.  Right now masses of Haitians are settling into life in tent cities.  Aid organizations and the Haitian government have established water supplies for some of these tent cities.  But as Sabri Ben-Achour reports from Port-au-Prince, sanitation is another matter.

SABRI BEN-ACHOUR: In a scene typical of any big tent city here, people huddle around a curious looking box of tanks and tubes.  This miniature purification plant is the only source for clean, free water for the 4,600 people who now live in this soccer stadium.  The machine pumps water from an underground tank, chemically sterilizes it, and dispenses it into plastic jugs, metal bowls, or whatever other containers the camp dwellers bring.  One camp dweller is Natasha Jean.  For drinking and cooking she says.  Jean will take the water back to a sheet stretched on poles that she calls home.  Some camps have giant bladders that look like hot water bottles.  Others have big tanks of water.  A few of the smallest camps have nothing at all, though water was among the earliest services to reach hundreds of thousands of displaced Haitians.  Not quite enough to keep fights from breaking out, says Pierre Fritzner.  He mans the purification pump at the stadium.  People battle, he says, especially when people try to get a lot of water at one time.  I’m just here to work the pump and to try and maintain discipline, so there’s not much I can do about it.  Two blocks away are the bathrooms.  Four port-a-potties, for 920 families.  Seventeen-year-old Shilov Dol says they are so foul and so far away that people have stopped using them.  He points to the real bathroom, a nearby field.  But the smell coming from little pockets around the stadium signals it’s not just the field.

WILLIAM SABATER:  Anywhere.  Any open space available in the area.

BEN-ACHOUR: William Sabater is a sanitation engineer from the Philippines who is among the many volunteers trying to work on sanitation here.

SABATER: So that really making the bad situation worse.

BEN-ACHOUR: At a lower elevation and a few dozen feet from the stadium is a trench where people bathe and wash their clothes.

SABATER: It is not actually advisable to bathe in that area.  And also the waste water are deposited on the tennis court just beside the stadium.  So this tennis court is already filled with stagnant water.  So that could be a breeding place also for vectors.

BEN-ACHOUR: Vectors like flies that spread disease.  Jen McNulty is a Chicago doctor volunteering at the stadium.

JEN MCNULTY: It’s a set up.  It’s a set up for cholera.

BEN-ACHOUR: Just wait, McNulty says, until it rains.  The water from the field will wash into the bathing area, perhaps even to the other camps.  People will track it into their homes.

MCNULTY: Cholera is the kind of disease that if it starts, it will kill a ton of people.  They’re all living in the same environment.  So if it does start, it’s going to be hard to stop.

BEN-ACHOUR: She’s already had a few scares.

MCNULTY: At the stadium we’re seeing quite a bit of diarrhea, colds, coughs, general infectious diseases.  For a few days we were concerned because a lot of young infants were having frequent diarrhea, very watery diarrhea and that’s really what sets Cholera apart.

BEN-ACHOUR: McNulty says that problem seems to have cleared up.  But the Haitian government and all of the 30 to 40 NGO’s trying to remedy the situation are racing against time.  The rainy season is coming.  Paul Nouvellon works for the National Administration for Potable Water and Sanitation.

PAUL NOUVELLON: This is obviously a big issue.

BEN-ACHOUR: There are up to 600 tent cities in the region and each will require a different solution.

NOUVELLON: What we are facing now is we’ve got two types of scenes, where we can dig latrines and where we cannot dig anything.

BEN-ACHOUR: That is, in some places they can dig trenches or outhouses.  In others, NGO’s like UNICEF are ordering chemical toilets, above-ground septic tanks and other semi-permanent structures.  They have not all arrived.

NOUVELLON: Then there is an urgent need for desludging trucks.

BEN-ACHOUR: Those too are on order.  Nouvellon says there is yet another challenge to resolve before they arrive.  There is no officially sanctioned dump site, just a landfill in the countryside.  Back at the tent city in the soccer stadium, Stephanie Jeannot is walking her children towards a grassy area.  We need help, she says, because the whole structure of this country is smashed.  For The World, I’m Sabri Ben-Achour, Port-au-Prince.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Phil Mercer’s BBC article from December 2009
• Australia.gov: Water for the Future

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  Australia is a dry and thirsty land…and Sydney is a dry and thirsty city.  But now, Sydney residents are getting some of their drinking water from a new desalination plant.  Phil Mercer reports that the plant has opened to mixed reviews

PHIL MERCER: Australia is in the midst of an historic eight-year drought, the worst in a century.  Sydney, the country’s largest city, has been particularly hard hit.  And there are concerns that it might be undergoing a long-term shift in its climate.  Meanwhile, 50,000 new residents a year are pouring into the increasingly thirsty city.  That’s the dilemma that Sydney’s new water factory aims to help address.

KRISTINA KENEALLY: It’s a great pleasure to be standing here inside Sydney’s desalination plant.

MERCER: Kristina Keneally is the American-born Premier of the state of New South Wales.

KENEALLY: This is about preparing for Sydney’s expanding population.  In the face of climate change, in the face of increasing drought, it is important we are securing Sydney’s water supply.

MERCER: The new plant sucks water from a tunnel laid from the shore out into the Tasman Sea.  It’s then pushed through membranes small enough to capture the salt in a process called reverse osmosis. The plant can pump 66 million gallons of water each day, about 15% of the city’s needs.  It costs 1.7 billion U.S. dollars, and will push household water bills in Sydney up 40% over the next four years.  But Kerry Schott, of the Sydney Water Corporation, says it’s well worth the expense.

KERRY SCHOTT: We have historically had cities run out of water and they have been abandoned.  That can happen in inland Australia also, and we certainly don’t want it happening in a major city like Sydney

MERCER: But conservationists argue that the plant is a mistake.  They say Sydney has no water crisis because efficiency measures have helped consumers learn to use far less.  And they’re concerned about the plant’s impact on the marine environment.  John Kaye is a Greens M.P. in the New South State Parliament.

JOHN KAYE: The construction of the tunnel under Botany Bay, gouged through the bottom of a very old bay, stirring up all sorts of heavy metals and all sorts of other materials that is having massive impacts on the ecology of the bay.  And also dumping high salinity concentrate out into the ocean at the end.

MERCER: Kay is especially worried about the impact on migratory humpback whales, which pass by Sydney twice a year. The Water Corporation insists that the plant won’t harm marine life, and says its salty waste will be easily absorbed by fast moving sea currents.  Plant backers also point to an important environmental innovation. Desalination plants use huge amounts of electricity.  In Australia, that generally means burning a lot of coal.  But the Water Corporation’s Kerry Schott says this one will be powered by renewable energy.

SCHOTT: A wind farm near Canberra. They provide us power obviously when the wind is blowing and when the wind isn’t blowing we just take power out of the grid and they replace it with more wind power the next time the wind does blow.  So, that solved our energy issue.

MERCER: Greens M.P John Kaye isn’t satisfied with that solution.

KAYE: The government says it is all powered by green energy but that green energy could have been used to offset coal generation elsewhere.

MERCER: For their part, these Sydney’s residents at Coogee Beach just up the coast from the desalination plant also have mixed feelings about the new facility.

FEMALE SPEAKER: The water is certainly not going to come from the desert, it has got to come from somewhere.  So, yeah, if they can make use of the vast amount of seawater that we’ve got, then, you know, it’s got to be a good thing.

MALE SPEAKER: Well, I think it is a waste of money.  It costs over a billion dollars or a couple of billion to make it when you’ve got massive dams that are half full.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I think it’s just a big waste of money.  It just provides just what, 17% of   Sydney’s water, which is nothing.  It’s too costly.

MERCER: However well the new plant is received here in Sydney, it may be just a taste of things to come in Australia.  Across the continent, authorities are forging ahead with plans for a second desalination plant near the Western Australian City of Perth. For the World, I’m Phil Mercer, Sydney.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

SOS Mata Atlantica says Brazilian households can save more than a thousand gallons of water a year by cutting back on one toilet flush a day. The group isn’t exactly urging people to hold it in. It’s suggesting instead that people relieve themselves in the shower.

They’re not kidding around… this TV ad below shows the Statue of Liberty, Gandhi, basketball players and all sorts of cartoon characters piddling in the shower. They deliver the message that urinating in the shower is harmless and keeps fresh water from being flushed down the toilet.

So, what are you doing to conserve water?

Low flow toilets?
Fewer car washes?
or maybe showering with friend?

Leave your comment below.