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Thursday, July 31, 2014

A drying up world

"There will be no water by 2040 if we keep doing what we're doing today," said Professor Benjamin Sovacool of Denmark's Aarhus University, who co-authored two reports on the world's rapidly decreasing sources of freshwater. "If we keep doing business as usual, we are facing an insurmountable water shortage — even if water was free, because it's not a matter of the price," Sovacool said. "There's no time to waste. We need to act now."

 Most power plants do not even log how much water they use to keep the systems going.
"It's a huge problem that the electricity sector do not even realize how much water they actually consume," Sovacool said. "And together with the fact that we do not have unlimited water resources, it could lead to a serious crisis if nobody acts on it soon...We have to decide where we spend our water in the future," Sovacool said. "Do we want to spend it on keeping the power plants going or as drinking water? We don't have enough water to do both.”

The research says that utilizing alternative energy sources like wind and solar systems is vital to mitigating water consumption enough to stave off the crisis.

Unless water use is drastically minimized, the researchers found that widespread drought will affect between 30 and 40 percent of the planet by 2020, and another two decades after that will see a severe water shortage that would affect the entire planet. The demand for both energy and drinking water would combine to aggressively speed up drought, which in turn could exacerbate large-scale health risks and other global development problems.

The World Resources Institute estimates that in India, "water demand will outstrip supply by as much as 50 percent by 2030, a situation worsened further by the country's likely decline of available freshwater due to climate change".

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