The World Economic Forum has projected a startling statistic: by 2030, the demand for fresh water might exceed the global supply by a staggering 40%. Considering that fresh water is as vital to our survival as oxygen, this forecast paints a dire picture.
To address this looming crisis, we must either use less fresh water consumption, increase its supply, or ideally, both. This second essay in a three-part series on the fresh water crisis, will explore strategies for reducing our water usage. The final installment will explore innovative ways to augment our water supply. (Part-3 spoiler: water supply and demand are so misaligned that even towing icebergs is getting a serious look.)
By The Numbers
We saw the numbers in Part I of this series, fresh water use is exploding.
The fresh water used in 2014, 4 trillion cubic liters, is comparable to the volume of Lake Michigan.
Curtailing fresh water use is a global challenge with no easy solutions. Results are often counterintuitive: innovations offering water efficiency often incentivize increased water use!
The $300M Mud Puddle
In most metropolitan areas, the typical concerns about water revolve around what flavor to buy and how long to shower. However in agriculture centers like Oklahoma, where irrigation uses ground water, the pressing concern is when the wells will run dry.
Optima Reservoir, constructed in the 1970s at a cost of $50 million (around $300 million today), sits atop a colossal ancient water supply, the Great Plains or Ogallala Aquifer. Above this aquifer, 450,000 square kilometers of prime farmland produce vast quantities of wheat and livestock feed, such as maize and soybeans, for the nation and much of the world.
The Optima Dam was designed to be fed by the Beaver River, which draws its water from the aquifer. Before the advent of intensive irrigation and erosion-control methods like terracing and no-till farming, the Beaver River was notorious for devastating floods. The proposed solution: build a dam to capture the torrential runoff, creating a reservoir for recreation, agriculture, and household use. In 1978, construction crews completed the 5,144-meter-long, 37-meter-tall earth dam. However, there was one significant issue: the Beaver River had dwindled to a mere trickle.
Lake Optima never materialized. By the early 1990s, the lake was a mud puddle at the base of the hulking dam. The expected 600,000 annual outdoors enthusiasts never came to fish or swim. Federal maintenance funding halted in 2010, with the last outlay used to dismantle 161 derelict picnic shelters, campsites, and restrooms.
The Great Plains Aquifer
An aquifer is nature’s geological sponge. Beneath the American heartland, porous rock holds water that has seeped down for millennia. If we squeezed the Great Plains Aquifer dry, it would submerge the entire United States in 46 centimeters of water. Nearly 2 million people rely on it for all their household water, and it irrigates 30% of the nation’s crops. Water shortage? What water shortage? While nature refills the aquifer over 6,000 years, we’ll drain it in under 700 as a tragedy of the commons unfolds.
Farming drains the aquifer by 3% every 20 years. Post-WWII technological advances brought smaller, cheaper, and more reliable engines to farmers’ wells, causing a surge in water pumping, cultivation, and production to feed the booming population. However, water supply and demand careened out of balance causing the aquifer’s water table to plummet.
Image: USGS
Building support for Great Plains Aquifer conservation is challenging. Shrinking aquifers have a major marketing problem: we can’t see them disappearing. Farmers only sense the issue when they need to drill deeper wells, but as long as they can drill, the pumps keep pumping and the crops keep growing.
A 2022 Kansas State University survey of 1,226 Great Plains farmers illustrates a tragedy of the commons. Farmers profess groundwater conservation but maintain they are not personally responsible for the problem or its solution.
Response to : “Groundwater should be conserved today so that future generations in my area can enjoy the benefits I have experienced”
Response to: “I feel personally responsible for groundwater depletion in my area”
Data: Kansas State University
Political fragmentation adds to the difficulty. The aquifer spans eight states and hundreds of counties, each with different groundwater challenges. For instance, Nebraska farmers report few water issues and even rising water tables while the area surrounding Oklahoma’s Optima Dam suffers severe depletion.
“Optima Puddle” is an early casualty of a slowly vanishing aquifer.
Exponential Irrigation Tech to the Un-Rescue
I often embrace cool tech solutions for tough problems. Part 1 explored highly-efficient irrigation breakthroughs but noted a catch: technology advances quickly, but humans don’t. Enter the Jevons Paradox: more efficient but unrestricted irrigation encourages farmers to use more water, not less. Wait, what?
The Jevons Paradox originated in Industrial Revolution Manchester, where cheaper coal and more efficient furnaces led to a spike in coal consumption. The more efficiently a resource is used, the more it gets used. Did you know that installing a low-flow shower head often leads to greater water use? You linger longer, enjoying the warm shower, ultimately using more water than before.
More efficient irrigation increases water use in two ways. The first is simple: you can expand your fields until the effort and cost of producing more food balance the increased profit. The second is subtler but equally crucial.
In Part 1, we imagined a farm as a food factory and water as a key input. Many crops, especially grains common in High Plains agriculture, grow and yield more if you keep applying the right amount of water at the right time. High Plains farmers, experts in irrigation and yield, precisely tune their operations. Super-efficient irrigation systems like drop-head sprinklers deliver just the right amount of water for plant growth, with virtually none percolating back into the aquifer. They use more total water to produce more food from the same field while further drawing down the aquifer.
California’s Central Valley farmers use advanced irrigation, especially drip systems, to grow water-intensive but high-value crops like stone fruits, grapes, and nuts. Almost all the precisely-applied water goes into those luscious fruits and nutritious nuts, with none percolating down into the aquifer.
In 2017, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) documented the impacts of more efficient irrigation in multiple countries. These impacts are hyper-local, varying from valley to valley and water source to water source. The FAO presents long-term research showing the Jevons Paradox in action, with hyper-efficient irrigation leading to greater agricultural water use in global locales well beyond the United States’ High Plains.
Watery Complexity
Managing agricultural water use is deceptively complex. Growing more crops requires more water—that’s straightforward. Technology allows farmers to access more fresh water and grow more food, which is good. But water used for food can’t be used for anything else, whether it’s replenishing an aquifer, flushing brackish delta water out to sea, or flushing a toilet. (Part 3 spoiler alert: water used for flushing a toilet is often reused for growing food.)
Eating less to save water isn’t a healthy or popular option, and food shortages often lead to armed conflict, so growing less food trades one problem for a bigger one.
What if we ate differently? Are there foods that require less irrigation but provide the same nutrition, and do they taste good?
Eating Less Water
I love ribeye steak. Grilled medium-rare and pared with malbec it is… making my mouth water as I write. Beef is also loaded with protein essential to good human health: what could possibly be wrong with eating a good steak? Nothing, unless we start running out of fresh water. Oh yeah, that’s the course we’re currently on.
Humans require a variety of nutrients for good health, but let’s focus on a crucial one: protein. According to Harvard Medical School, we need about 0.79 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day to stay healthy. This amount serves as a minimum to prevent illness, but for optimal health, it’s safe to assume we need a bit more.
Let’s say an average man weighing 72 kilograms, whose exercise mainly consists of walking around the office, needs around 60 grams of protein per day to maintain health. The following chart shows the amount of many popular foods that our average man must eat to acquire those 60 grams of daily protein.
- Sources:
- https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/2646172/nutrients
- https://www.waterfootprint.org/resources/interactive-tools/product-gallery/
- https://gogreenaquaponics.com/blogs/news/how-to-raise-tilapia-in-aquaponics
- https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46654042
Almonds, though delicious, are quite water-thirsty. They hail from trees that require year-round irrigation for a single annual harvest. On the other hand, peanuts pack 17% more protein by weight than almonds and need water only during their four-month growing season.
Despite my fondness for a medium-rare ribeye, I acknowledge its water footprint. A modest 8-ounce steak (226 grams) will consume roughly 3,000 liters of water before gracing my plate. However, I can reduce my steak consumption without drastically altering my lifestyle, especially if I substitute beef with sea-farmed, buttery salmon steaks that require minimal fresh water to produce.
The truth is, many of our favorite foods demand significant amounts of fresh water to reach our tables. For instance, if you’re reading this in a bar, that pint of beer you’re enjoying required nearly 300 liters of water to produce. And if you’re at a café, your small-late-2%-milk-no-foam-medium-hot (all one word from the customer in front of me at Starbucks yesterday) used approximately 170 liters of water, while your tea-loving friend’s cuppa with milk and sugar sipped only 150 liters, most of it from the milk.
We Send Water to Landfills
Another harsh reality is the massive amount of food waste we generate. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that the country squanders up to 40% of its food supply. Globally, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that about a third of all food produced for humans goes to waste. Minimizing food waste presents a readily available solution to increase our food supply without further straining water resources. But how do we end up discarding so much food?
Between the fields and the retail shelves, food loss occurs during drying, milling, transportation, and processing, as the food becomes vulnerable to insects, rodents, birds, molds, and bacteria. At the retail stage, equipment malfunctions, over-ordering, and the rejection of imperfectly colored or shaped produce contribute to food waste.
Unfortunately, consumers are major contributors to food waste. Discarded food is the largest contributor to US city landfills, driven by consumers purchasing more food than needed or misunderstanding “sell by” and “fresh until” labels.
Waste occurs at every stage of the supply chain, creating opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs to intervene and provide solutions.
Numerous apps offer personalized food plans based on budget, metabolism, available ingredients, and location.
Imperfect Foods, a San Francisco-based benefit corporation, rescues high-quality but cosmetically imperfect foods and sells them directly to consumers at steep discounts. After you’ve diced a tomato for your salad does it really matter if the fruit once looked like Cyrano de Bergerac?
The US government has also prioritized reducing food waste, aiming to halve it by 2030 through a national strategy proposed by the FDA, USDA, and EPA.
OK, Now Some Cool Tech
Of course, there’s a ton of work on novel technologies to cut water use without sacrificing our quality of life.
In Part-1 I touched on several projects to select or genetically modify staples like rice and wheat to require less water. CRISPR gene editing is accelerating that line of innovation. Researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel are using CRISP gene editing to develop tomatoes that require less water. These bio-engineered tomatoes transpire less water without compromising fruit growth, and similar techniques are being explored for other nutritious vegetables.
In Scotland, the Salt Farm Foundation is cultivating popular crops in sea water. They’ve found specific varieties of potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, beets, and strawberries with high salt tolerance. They also grow staples like oats, barley, onions and sugar beets in brackish water.
Lab-grown meat, which I’ve written about previously, could significantly reduce water usage compared to traditional animal farming, potentially by 82% to 96% depending on the animal. However, political factors pose challenges to its widespread adoption. The US state of Florida has banned lab-grown meat as Governor Ron DeSantis reasons, “Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals. We will save our beef.”
Never let progress toward inexpensive, tasty, high-quality nutrition get in the way of a good campaign speech zinger.
Engineered vegetables and animal protein that need less water and staple foods growing in salt water are tantalizing technologies but their time horizons are uncertain. There are no magic bullets to slay the fresh water shortage beast. Cutting consumption will have to come, in the short run, from a barrage of old-fashioned techniques.
We Have Seen How to Drastically Reduce Water Use
Limiting water use at scale, whether for food or households or industry, is difficult and typically driven by extreme circumstances. For example, when a major city runs out of water.
Day Zero 2018 in Cape Town
Cape Town, population 4.6 million, barely escaped running dry in 2018. Years of drought had turned reservoirs into sandscapes and new water sources like desalination plants could not be ramped in time to prevent the disaster. With no single solution, no magic exponential technology to miraculously create water abundance, leaders threw the entire public and private sector water-savings tool box at the problem and drove broad public support for drastic water use reduction.
Local officials labeled the projected date that the metropolis’ water supply would totally fail, April 12, 2018 “Day Zero.” In February the national government throttled Ag-water allocation. Astoundingly, farmers even agreed to divert additional stored water to the city.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Zaian – Own work CC BY-SA 4.0
City government hiked water fees and prohibited using municipal water for swimming pools, lawns, and other non-essential uses. Golf courses and public parks were not watered.
Adding to fees and regulations the government also implemented a new water-pressure system, a technology tool, saving about 10 percent of overall municipal water consumption.
A massive communication campaign promoted water savings as the Day Zero clock counted down. The city launched an online water map to show water consumption on a household level: people could easily compare their consumption to their neighbors and the rest of the city, and social pressure and buy-in grew.
Businesses held “dirty shirt” challenges to see who could go the most days without washing their work shirt. Restaurants and bars posted, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow” signs in their restrooms.
Governmental and civic organizations published water-saving techniques, and people traded tips on social media.
By February 20, less than three weeks after the government engaged the water restrictions, Cape Town cut its daily water consumption to less than 50% of pre-drought levels. Officials pushed Day Zero back into the region’s rainy season, to July 9, 2018.
At the end of June nature rescued the region with average rainfall for the first time in four years. Rain and conservation pushed dam water levels sustainable heights and Cape Town canceled Day Zero indefinitely. But it was a wakeup call for Cape Town and the rest of the world.
Cape Town’s narrow escape wasn’t attributable to a single initiative or technology but rather a multifaceted approach driven by technology, regulation, communication, and community engagement.
There Are No Easy Solutions For Water Savings
Water shortages like those in the United States’ Great Plains and South Africa’s Cape Town are found globally. Farmers and other citizens do not believe that they are responsible for the challenge or can meaningfully impact it. Significantly reducing fresh water use is possible but the solutions are either painful, like firm government mandated quotas, or uncertain in impact or schedule like the many enticing new technologies. With one notable exception: wasting less food.
Tossing less food in the waste bin injects more money into our bank accounts: what’s wrong with that? Government initiatives to create easier to understand food labelling will help. I also think that less shapely produce needs a marketing campaign like, “I’m ugly and delicious.”
To close the coming 40% gap between fresh water supply and demand we must also focus on increasing supply.
Part Three – What About Making More Fresh Water?
Part-3 of this three-part series will dive into the many active global projects aiming to radically increase our fresh water supply. As with decreasing demand there are no easy solutions but fresh water abundance is a real possibility. However, it will take some patient and clever marketing to convince populations to accept some of the techniques. I’ll leave you with this teaser: “Toilet-to-table.”
In the meantime, feel free to post your ideas for using less water on a global scale without sacrificing quality of life.
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