Water scarcity has long been a problem. But climate change, a growing global population and economic growth are putting the natural resource under even more stress.
Brown with rust two ships stand like stone upright in the yellow sand. The wind swirls salty air around the the trawlers, silence ...
By Dennis Dimick, National Geographic
PUBLISHED AUGUST 21, 2014
Aquifers provide us freshwater that makes up for surface water lost from drought-depleted lakes, rivers, and reservoirs. We are drawing down these hidden, mostly nonrenewable groundwater supplies at unsustainable rates in the western ...
Maria Venegas, 61, holds 20-month-old grandson Julian after giving him a bath outside. They live in Seville, California, a community in the San Joaquin Valley whose water system failed this summer but will soon be fixed. Maria rarely has running water in the house.
Farmers are guzzling ground...
About one third of Earth's largest groundwater basins are being rapidly depleted by human consumption, despite having little accurate data about how much water remains in them, according to two new studies led by the University of California, Irvine (UCI), using data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and...
In the wake of California Gov. Jerry Brown's decision to enact mandatory restrictions on the use of water given the state's ongoing, historic drought, people nationwide have become obsessed with almonds. Not in the sense that people are buying and eating lots of almonds, mind you. In the sense that ...
PHILADELPHIA — Groundwater and air quality testing before, during, and after natural gas drilling – which includes hydraulic fracturing -- should be key components of efforts to ensure the safety of communities near these sites, according to an expert panel convened to weigh in on public health rese...
Japan on Monday started work on an underground ice wall at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, freezing the soil under broken reactors to slow the build-up of radioactive water, officials said.
The wall is intended to block groundwater from nearby hillsides that has been flowing under the plant a...
Clean water is life’s most basic need, yet one in eight people of the world’s population do not have access to it. In Cambodia, a country of 14.8 million, there are over 9,000,000 cases of diarrhea. Bad water accounts for 13% of the deaths and 14.8% of the health burden. Without a better water sourc...
When it comes to our water footprint, the majority of us think that it’s just made up of the water that we drink and use to wash with, when actually this far from the case – only making up roughly 5% of our overall consumption. It may sound surprising but the other 95% of our water footprint, is ind...
The end of the rainy season is nearly here, and California faces a long, dry summer with a Sierra snowpack that is only 33% of normal. There is no significant precipitation in the forecast for California through April 25, but the state still has another shot at a decent round of heavy precipitation ...
Water scarcity was, until recently, considered by most of the developed world to be like James Hilton's Lost Horizon: "far away, at the very limit of distance." However, the convergence of aquifer depletion from increasing agricultural, industrial and municipal water use with more frequent and...
Water bottles, drinking fountains, toilet trips and hand washing – in manyschools, it is easy to take clean water for granted.
Yet the United Nations estimates that at least 780 million people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water – more than 2.5 times the population ...
As California's drought deepens, 17 communities across the state are in danger of running out of water within 60 to 120 days, state officials said Tuesday.
In some communities, wells are running dry. In others, reservoirs are nearly empty. Some have long-running problems that predate the drought.
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Not surprisingly, the largest market for bottled water is here in the United States. In 2007, Americans purchased 8.8 billion gallons of water and bottled water sales netted a hefty $11.7 billion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, bottled water costs 240 to over 10,000 times more p...
The culmination of the five-year project has been the development of an integrated action planning toolkit on wetland conservation and management, which can be adapted to help provide bespoke solutions to protect valuable ecosystems around the globe.
Launched today at events in China, India and Vie...
Injecting fluids into the Earth, whether to recover natural gas or to obtain thermal energy from the planet, can cause earthquakes. New reports that look at American fracking, deep waste-water injection and geothermal activities suggest there are big risks and thus a need to develop strong regulator...
We all have a responsibility to think about the environment, and protecting the planet is just one of our daily duties. Your home is the only place you have total control over, so it's time for you to consider how you can cut back on your carbon footprint. Whether it's natural Essentia mattr...
Last month, Obama was considering whether or not to approve the Keystone XLpipeline in his speech at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., declaring that the "net effects of the pipeline's impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is all...
