Water Conservation in Flood Times

The amount of water on the planet is finite and has not fluctuated throughout history. However, the human population has exploded. Even though the growth rate is dropping the population is still growing. This means that irrespective of other factors the available water per person is dropping and dropping fast.

In times of local droughts, people feel the decrease of water availability more acutely and are often willing to change their habits accordingly but the reality is that there are three major factors affecting water availability. These three factors are the aforementioned population explosion, the increasing pollution of water systems and the climate change that is making regional droughts much more extreme.

The worldwide human population only reached one billion in the 1800’s but now we are adding about a billion people about every thirteen years. Just in the last forty years, the human population on Earth has doubled. At this rate, it is expected that 3.5 billion people will face water shortage issues by 2025.

Just as critical as the human population explosion is the increasing pollution and contamination of various water sources. Water pollution is a problem because it impacts not only humans but also flora and fauna. In effect, water pollution creates blight and is extremely destructive to the environment.

We know that about seventy percent of industrial waste is dumped into surrounding bodies of water and that fourteen billion pounds of garbage is dumped into the ocean each year. This pollution is very expensive to clean up and leads to a reality where over 700 million people worldwide drink contaminated water. According to UNICEF more than three thousand children worldwide die every DAY due to drinking contaminated water.

Climate change is making regional droughts more acute. The attendant lack of surface water leads people to tap further and further into groundwater supplies which in some areas has led the land to settle and even sink substantially. While originally it was expected that groundwater aquifers would be naturally replenished when the land sinks that option disappears. In addition, global warming has meant that substantially reduced snowpack no longer serves as a natural storage system for water but instead is lost as the snow melts away quicker than in the past and just flows down rivers to the ocean.

All of these reasons should make you realize that although water may appear more plentiful in a flood year, the reality is that habits learned and adopted in drought years need to kept and even improved upon regardless of the weather.