Water Resources Expert, Dr Osman Alhassan, says the threat of water scarcity, due to climate change and the pollution water bodies, calls for a water harvesting culture. “We need to do a lot concerning water harvesting and I think it was about time we made efforts to separate water use categories where for example we can begin with good water harvesting at the community level and district level and we could use that water for other things than household and drinking,” he said. Commenting on the Ghana Water Company’s plan to soon begin rationing water supply due to the dry season, Dr Alhassan said although some homes already harvest water, there was a need to for national approach, complemented by modern technology and by-laws. Communications Director of the Ghana Water Company, Stanley Mantey, recently said the rate of evaporation of water…

California just recently came out of a terrifying drought, which underscores the very real problems that will face water systems going forward. Simply put, many of the places where we live have water systems heavily affected by climate change. And for Cape Town, South Africa’s largest city with nearly four million residents, it’s close to becoming an outright crisis. Simply put, there is, potentially, a day on the calendar (“Day Zero”) when Cape Town, which is already rationing its water, will officially run out. And there may not be many realistic long-term solutions, if the drought keeps up, but here are the essential details of this crisis: Cape Town residents are currently living on only 13 gallons of water a day: The water ration, already a quarter of what your average American uses in a day, was just cut by nearly half. For contrast, thirteen gallons is enough water for a six minute…

“But believe me, once you factor in cooking, all the water your dog slurps out of the bowl and onto the floor, and the occasional mini shower while standing over a bucket so you can reuse the water to flush the toilet, there’s not a lot left over.” In late January, Helen Zille, the head of the provincial government warned that if the taps do run dry, it would be "the disaster above all disasters".
Cape Town accesses its water from six major reservoirs that can collectively store 898,000 megalitres of water.
Day Zero occurs when the system’s stored water drops to 13.5 per cent of capacity.
David Olivier, a postdoctoral research fellow at Global Change Institute, says in 2015 the city of Cape Town was allocated 60 per cent of the Western Cape’s water supply system with nearly all the rest going to agriculture and livestock.
While there’s no suggestion that the situation in Cape Town will lead to conflict, that may not always be the case.
Something that Francesco Femia, co-president of the Centre for Climate Change and Security in the United States, says comes down to a crucial issue: climate change is not regarded as a national security issue in most places.
And Femia says water shortages will contribute to an increased likelihood of conflict unless major steps are taken by governments and international communities.
In the United States, the situation has reached a point where the country no longer has a set fire season.
National guards are brought in from other states and federal resources devoted to putting out the fires are not usually enough.
But are governments completely unprepared for the threat of climate change and water shortages, especially in growing, densely populated cities such as Cape Town?

When most of us think about the threats posed by climate change, events like floods, droughts, intense storms and hotter temperatures come to mind.
These are all, according to the vast majority of scientists, exactly what we can expect to see more and more of.
However, what is often overlooked are the sociopolitical consequences of these climatic changes.
In other words, we tend to view these natural disasters in a vacuum without recognizing the myriad ways in which climate change is both directly and indirectly shaping economies, cultures and governments.
This being the case, looking back at conflicts such as those in Syria and the Sudan, it has become increasingly clear that climate change played a role in triggering the instability that led to these conflicts.
Which begs the question: could these conflicts have been prevented through non-political measures that responded to changes in climate?
The answer increasingly seems to be yes.
Further developments in biotechnology and a deeper understanding of what triggered the conflicts in Syria and Sudan point to novel prevention solutions grounded in modern agriculture.
The arrival of genetically engineered (GE) drought-tolerant crops that can withstand longer and more intense droughts could have the potential to prevent future conflicts.
Read full, original post: GMO crops could help stem famine and future global conflicts

The next 100 years could see Auckland’s average temperature increase by 3.75C along with an increase in floods, superstorms, coastal erosion and wildfires.
A Niwa report released today revealed the Auckland region’s climate will get hotter and the weather more volatile over the next 100 years.
Average temperatures would also increase by up to 3.75C by 2110.
At a presentation of the report this afternoon, Niwa’s chief scientist for climate, Sam Dean said while this wouldn’t equate to extreme changes to our climate, it would require us to change aspects of our lifestyles and design of the city.
And that presents challenges for infrastructure in responding to that," he said.
Auckland Council’s Head of Strategy and Planning at Auckland Emergency Management Craig Glover said climate change would impact us all in some way, shape or form.
The list goes on and on."
It looks at the impact climate change would have on different environments and sectors within the Auckland Region in terms of water quality and soil changes as well as on our coastal communities and biodiversity through sea-level rises and increased sea surface temperatures.
A "mid-range scenario" looked at what would happen if emissions were to stabilise, while a "business-as-usual scenario"saw emissions continue unabated.
Chief engineer Sarah Sinclair said the key thing was acting now to mitigate changes as they happened.

New research is shedding light on the potential consequences of geoengineering the planet.
That approach, in a sense, has already been tested in nature.
Big volcanic eruptions have cooled the planet by injecting ash into the atmosphere.
Reducing hurricane activity in the Atlantic might sound like a positive, knock-on benefit.
“That sounds beneficial after the hurricane season we’ve just had,” Anthony Jones of the University of Exeter, one of the paper’s authors, told Seeker.
“But if you just inject into the north, you also increase the risk of drought in the Sahel.” The Sahel is a region in Africa bordering the Sahara Desert and is prone to acute drought.
The United Nations said in 2012 that 15 million people were malnourished in West Africa and the Sahel primarily due to drought.
“Geoengineering regionally and unilaterally could have dire consequences for other parts of the planet,” Jones said.
Despite the risks, scientists who study geoengineering suggest the process may buy crucial time for humanity to transition away from carbon-intensive economies that are the cause of global warming.
“But the consequences of climate change are also quite terrifying.

James Kung’u from Kenyatta University in Kenya assesses migration in the context of climate change and conflicts over water resource.
Water resources must be managed better, Kowenje argues, and international cooperation can help.
When people leave an area, water demand is reduced there.
However, it increases in the places the people move to.
Both the influx of people and climate change are aggravating water and livelihood problems.
Arwa Hamaideh from the University of Jordan agrees.
Her country is struggling to accommodate masses of people.
The main challenge is ensuring that the basic human needs of the refugees are met.
The refugee crisis is not a temporary matter, so Jordan needs financial help, Hamaideh demands.
She emphasises that climate change is causing problems that are further exacerbated by the influx of migrants.

Originally published on Planetsave.
Two major drought indices in Europe are deviating from each other in a way that’s consistent with many climate change simulations — further gaining ground in the march towards the attribution of major events like droughts to climate change — according to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Image via NOAA/Earth System Research Laboratory “This is one more big drop in the bucket toward climate change attribution,” commented lead author James Stagge of Utah State University’s Utah Water Research Lab.
“There have been a lot of projections, but now that we’re starting to see the projections and observations line up, it’s not a question of ‘is it happening?’ It’s a question of ‘how much?’ And ‘what do we do?
‘” The observations by the researchers match earlier work predicting that drought frequency would decrease in Northern Europe and increase in Southern Europe as the result of climate change.
Speaking about the effect of evapotranspiration on drought occurrence, Stagge stated: “When you include evapotranspiration, the border from where it’s getting wetter to where it’s getting drier is pushing farther and farther north.
In a stationary climate, Stagge and co-authors say they would expect this difference to be randomly distributed and stable like it was from the 1950s through the 1970s.
‘This recent and consistently increasing trend is a clear signal, not random noise,’ he added.
“Stagge says the new findings are important to the scientific community and could influence public policy and Europe’s agriculture industries.
And in the short term, extreme heat waves like the recent “Lucifer” heat wave will be becoming much more common.

Should we not expect it given Cape Town’s climate?
Will every future year look like this one?
Can we consider the last three years to be an expression of a trend and extrapolate it into the future like so: Or should we assume that Cape Town’s climate has changed and from now on we will have only dry years, like 2017: Is The New Normal going to be one of the above?
In summer, the cold fronts still occur, but they are located well to the south of Cape Town, and rain over the ocean.
We don’t just have high rainfall years, and low rainfall years.
We can’t predict how they will change over the next year but we can observe and predict long-term changes to the average positioning of high pressure systems and the westerly wind belts.
If so, then in the next years we will still see year-to-year variability in rainfall, perhaps with the mean trending towards a lower (near zero?)
In the figures, yellow dots mark years that have rainfall of magnitude corresponding to that recorded in Cape Town in 2017, i.e. years of drought.
In some projections there are many years of drought.
Their research covers various aspects of climate – from climate change, climate variability and seasonal forecast to consequences of climate events and communicating climate information.

News Release – LOGAN, UTAH – On the same day that global leaders wrapped up an international water and climate summit in Rome, researchers published new findings that suggest European drought trends are lining up with climate change projections.
Their study, published Oct. 25 in Scientific Reports, shows that two major drought indices are deviating from one another across Europe in a manner consistent with climate change simulations.
"This is one more big drop in the bucket toward climate change attribution," said lead author James Stagge, a post-doc at Utah State University’s Utah Water Research Lab.
"There have been a lot of projections, but now that we’re starting to see the projections and observations line up, it’s not a question of ‘is it happening?’
The spatial patterns observed by Stagge and his team match climate change projections for Europe that suggest decreases in drought frequency in the north and increases in drought frequency in the south.
"Once you add in the temperature increases for all of Europe, you have all the hallmarks of climate change," Stagge said.
Stagge explained that although one drought index captures this concept, the other does not.
"When you include evapotranspiration, the border from where it’s getting wetter to where it’s getting drier is pushing farther and farther north," he said.
This increasing deviation in European drought frequency is observed from the 1980s until today.
In a stationary climate, Stagge and co-authors say they would expect this difference to be randomly distributed and stable like it was from the 1950s through the 1970s.