WaterMore ways to combat water shortages

Water is the one element that every breathing, living organism on Earth needs, and unlike oil, there are no viable alternatives. In many undeveloped countries, water is becoming scarce. Concerns are growing about the availability of water in developed countries as well..

Many companies and governments are beginning to take steps to conserve water, and are finding new options to filter and desalinate water. Dr. Emma Stewart, industry sustainability solutions lead at Autodesk and appointed cabinet member of the Low Carbon Taskforce of the World Economic Forum, says, however, that there are many other things we can do to help the situation.

Water infrastructure in the United State is bad shape. In Houston last summer, aging pipes and pressure from increased water use led to 700 water main breaks a day. Stewart estimates that the United States loses one of every six gallons of fresh water per day due to leaky and outdated pipes.

The American Society of Civil Engineers(ASCE) gives the country’s water infrastructure a grade of D-, the lowest grade given to any segment of the U.S. infrastructure systems. The easy solution to these problems is to fix the pipes, but Stewart says that this answer is not a headline maker, and is therefore ignored.

“Incremental investment is sometimes the hardest thing to get,” Stewart told Forbes. “It’s not sexy – it’s just fixing leaky pipes.”

Another issue is money. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, it would cost $600 billion over the next twenty years to repair the U.S. water infrastructure. The ASCE however, says the price tag is $2.5 trillion.

“I took that with a grain of salt at first,” Stewart told Forbes. “Of course they [civil engineers] want jobs around this. But then we found out that the U.S. Conference of Mayors is saying it will take three to five trillion dollars. These are mayors who recognize this as crucial to their cities being able to remain vital places to live and work. And it’s not in mayors’ interest to inflate infrastructure costs.”

According to Stewart the money used for infrastructure improvements are not close to that amount.

“We only have about a third of that lined up from public sources,” Stewart said. “The private sector will have to step in.”

Another small step would be to reduce our consumption. According to the Pacific Institute the average American uses about seventy gallons of water per day. In some countries people do not use that much water in a month. The institute estimates Americans need only about thirteen gallons per day.

To improve the situation, some states are now putting in conservation measures on water use including fines on households that use too much water.

Now Stewart and Autodesk are also looking at ways that nature effects water as potential alternatives.

“One thing we [at Autodesk] are working on is whether we can borrow more from natural systems,” Stewart told Forbes. “Like the way soil filters water, or like the way topography slows water down. Can we introduce those natural best practices into the way civil engineers think? Rather than right angles and pipe and increased water treatment capacity, can we almost make it a little dirtier and more complicated by introducing things like green roofs and bioswails so that water slows down, cleans up, and more of it makes it to the aquifer?”

These solutions to water scarcity are by no means easy and their not ways to grab national attention, but would the world really care about headlines knowing they can get up every morning and go to their faucet or the lake or river they live next to and have a glass of water?

“There are some glimmers that we can do this,” Stewart told Forbes. “And if we find multiple solutions and combine them then it actually doesn’t really affect our quality of life.”