Water and its Troubles

Water is not being made, or nor is it being used up, but rather we are using more water for many more purposes than before. This creates a problem for people who depend on water for their life, rather than using them for applications and industry, people that need to drink and survive have relatively less water, a crisis that must be answered.

Awareness of water problems is also a crisis. The amount of the world’s population that are oblivious to many of the crises in the world create a blind eye to all the existing problems, not only allowing problems to grow more severe, but also allow corporations to take full advantage without any bothers.

With current trends and methods of water use in agriculture, we cannot support food for the next fifty years.

The average person’s daily diet needs 3000 liters of water converted from liquid to vapour (1 litre per calorie), and about2-5 litres per day for drinking. However, in the future, we will require more water for food, fiber, industrial crops, livestock and fish. The way people consume and how they use water to produce food can all be changed to counteract some water crises.

A canal 10m deep, 100m wide, 7.1mil kilometers long (enough to encircle globe 180 times) is the amount of water needed each year to produce food for 6.5 bil people (today’s population)

Total global freshwater withdrawals per year = 3800 cubic kms, 2700 cubic kms of that (70%) is used for irrigation (agriculture) to produce our food. Althoguh now all the water is “lost”, it goes back to the environment in lower quality than its original state.

0.017% of water available in lakes, inland seas, streams - 2.15% in ice caps and glaciers –fresh

Charles Ye

2038 5018

Condensed Information from Previous Blog

By 2030, food and energy demand will increase by 50%, fresh water by 30%

Food and agriculture use 70% of water collected from rivers and groundwater, half of this lost to evaporation, half absorbed for plant growth.

Water is major in the energy production energy, from the hydroelectric dams to making use of the change of level in tides.

On Average thermoelectric power withdraw 39% of total withdrawn freshwater in 2000

Water use for thermoelectricity increases over the years.

Irrigation fed water provide 45% of world’s food supplies, irrigation is currently drawing water at rate that is not sustainable.

Of 70% studied cities, half of urban agricultural land irrigated with waste water, creating health risks in the grown food esp in vegetables, cereals, rice

Only 1 percent of water is available for human use, 97.5 percent is salty, most fresh water is frozen, yet studies show careful control of our future actions can prevent a water crisis.

Charles Ye

2038 5018

Microhydro power generation

Microhydro power generation is small-scale and low-impact hydroelectric generation that produces 100kW or less of electricity.
Unlike large-scale hydro dams it does not require the diversion of large rivers, the construction of expensive infrastructure or significant alteration of the surrounding ecosystem.
Microhydro facilities can be installed anywhere where there is a fast-moving stream, where the water drops from a higher to lower location.
The amount of electricity that can be generated depends on the head (height from which water flows) and flow rate (amount of water flowing past a certain point).
Microhydro has a large potential in Canada because there are many streams, rivers and springs where plants can be installed.
British Columbia, Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec are the provinces with most potential for Microhydro because these provinces have either an abundance of steep streams and reliable precipitation.
Energy from microhydro facilities can be used directly (as AC power), converted to DC, or stored in batteries.  Facilities can be connected to the grid or be grid-independent.
The main drawback to microhydro is the cost of labour and expertise required during the installation process, as all the equipment need to be extremely site specific.

Citation:
"Micro-Hydro Systems- A Buyer's Guide," Natural Resources Canada, accessed December 8th, 2010,
http://canmetenergy-canmetenergie.nrcan-rncan.gc.ca/fichier/79276/buyersguidehydroeng.pdf

Mona Dai
December 9th, 2010

If we could reduce the world's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:

The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific

51 would be male, 49 would be female

82 would be non-white; 18 white

67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian

80 would live in substandard housing

67 would be unable to read

50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation

33 would be without access to a safe water supply

39 would lack access to improved sanitation

24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do
have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)

7 people would have access to the Internet

1 would have a college education

1 would have HIV

2 would be near birth; 1 near death

5 would control 32% of the entire world's wealth; all 5 would be US citizens

33 would be receiving --and attempting to live on-- only 3% of the income of "the village"

http://www.familycare.org/special-interest/if-the-world-were-a-village-of-100-people/