According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, 47 percent of the world's population will face severe water shortages by 2030.

Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/your-money/25iht-mwater26.1.12339292.html?pagewanted=2





Water supply shortages are becoming a problem of global proportion. In the past month, 2,000 farmers in India were arrested for stealing water; the regional government of the Spanish province of Catalonia said it was going to import water by boat and train beginning in May to provide summer supplies; the Queensland Water Commission in Australia put local residents on the toughest water restrictions; and in Atlanta, residents filed lawsuits against the municipal government in protest over faulty water pipes and failing sewer systems.
According to the World Water Institute, a mere 2.5 percent of the earth's ground and surface water is accessible for human use. This finite resource, maintained by the earth's hydrologic cycle, is used for everything from drinking water to sanitation, agriculture and industrial processes. Undermined by overuse, pollution and inefficient infrastructure as well as natural occurrences like drought, humankind's water supply is nearing its limit.
In a report released last month, the investment bank JPMorgan addressed the risk looming water supply shortages pose to companies. It included data from the World Resources Institute that half the world already faced water stress, or the deterioration of fresh water resources in quantity or quality, if not outright shortage.
The bank, echoing numerous entities tracking the issue, cited three primary factors for the supply-demand imbalance, including population growth, urbanization and climate change.
According to Antoine Frérot, chief executive of Veolia Water in Paris, all the necessary technologies and processes are there to resolve the issue directly, transforming wastewater into potable water. "They are already in place," Frérot said. "And the wastewater is there where we need it, just downstream of the cities. This would prevent overuse of freshwater."
Municipalities are using highly treated reclaimed wastewater to supplement the water supply, in some cases even for drinking. Frérot said Veolia had built and was operating a wastewater plant in Singapore that recycled gray water into water pure enough to drink, but for use by local semiconductor makers. It has accomplished a similar feat in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, where a wastewater recycling plant supplies about 250,000 residents with drinking water.
The problem, Frérot said, is not a lack of ability but a lack of interest. Until recently, public concern over the sustainability of water supplies has been relatively low in all but the most parched segments of the globe.
This could soon change. Based on present consumption levels, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development projects that by 2030, about 47 percent of the world's population will be living in areas with severe water stress. To the OECD, based in Paris, the situation represents, "one of the greatest human development challenges of the early 21st century."
Challenging, but rife with opportunity. Over the next 20 years, the United States is expected to spend about $1.2 trillion on repairing and upgrading its water management infrastructure.
Steve Allbee of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the money would go toward financing everything from wastewater reclamation and reuse plans to desalination plants and advanced filtration membranes. "This should be a period of dramatic change in how we accomplish the mission," Allbee said.
While desalination plants will be a part of the equation, Allbee said, reclamation and reuse plans like those being offered by Veolia are starting to "catch on in a big way" in cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Compared with desalination plants, water reuse facilities are less energy-intensive and require fewer investment dollars, Allbee said.
"We have been doing this for more than 30 years in Northern Virginia - I know it can be done, successfully," he said.
The water industry's capacity for cost-effective innovation in the face of looming scarcity is also rising in the awareness of investors. Stephen Hoffmann, a water resource economist and co-founder of the Palisades water indexes, said that "visibility and interest in the water industry is mushrooming."
The modified equal-dollar weighted indexes track the performance of global water concerns. According to Hoffmann, one index has increased more than 145 percent from 2002 to the end of last year while leading to the creation of two exchange-traded funds, PowerShares Global Water and PowerShares Water Resources among them.
Why water-related funds like these have, since their high, declined by as much as 10 percent when demand for water is soaring may seem paradoxical, given water's rising value.

Hoffmann, a 25-year industry veteran who also runs a private equity firm, WaterTech Capital, attributed the lackluster performance to a broad-based decline in global equity markets that he said has temporarily interrupted an expected rise. This softness, he claimed, will be short-lived.
Generating an estimated annual revenue of $400 billion, Hoffman estimated, water represents one of the largest industries on the planet.
A common mistake, Hoffman said, is that some beginning investors see water as a commodity like oil. While both are natural resources, there is no standardized pricing mechanism for a cubic meter of water, unlike a barrel of crude oil. As a result, the asset's market value is often capped and varies based more on political will than scarcity, he said.
Factors that affect pricing include demand, transport and treatment costs as well as price subsidies - sometimes as large as 40 percent to 50 percent of the unit's total cost.
"If water were a true commodity like oil," Hoffmann said, "the price of water in a given consumptive use would equate more with the marginal cost of providing it, including scarcity and ecological considerations."
While water may someday trade like oil, for the time being, experts agree it is most appropriately viewed as an infrastructure investment. From that standpoint, investors have a lot of options to choose from that will offer varying degrees of exposure to global water demand.
This money gets funneled through a vast pipeline of water concerns, including such traditional public-water utilities as United Utilities in Britain Suez in France and Companhia de Saneamento Básico do Estado de São Paulo in Brazil as well as diversified multinationals like General Electric and Dow Chemical, both based in the United States.
Investors who wade in still deeper will find infrastructure equipment manufacturers like Kurita Water Industries in Tokyo and Geberit in Switzerland, as well as lesser known technical innovators. In this tier are such companies as Halma of Britain, which develops infrastructure sensors capable of detecting leaks in failing water and sanitation pipes; Aqua Dyne of Australia, which is commercializing a water purification system recently acquired from Global Power & Water of the United States; and H2O Innovation of Canada, a developer of activated sludge and membrane bio-reactor technologies for water and wastewater treatment.
And then there are integrated companies like Veolia or Hyflux that make money at various points along the service chain. Hyflux, based in Singapore, not only builds and operates water plants but also develops technologies, including filtration membranes vital to desalination and waste treatment processes.
According to Sam Ong, deputy chief executive and chief financial officer of Hyflux, it is already a major player in China with about 40 plants. The company announced last week that it had won a $500 million reverse osmosis seawater desalination project in Algeria.
To maximize the returns generated from such multiyear concessions, the company went a step further in December, taking public Hyflux Water Trust, a water real estate investment trust traded on the Singapore Exchange with a yield of 8 percent, Ong said.
The value and availability of concessions like those being pursued by Hyflux could grow exponentially because of two developments: stricter regulatory measures and a pricing overhaul.
On the former, industry executives like Ong welcome the increasingly strict regulatory environment for water and sanitation. He cited China, where 70 percent of all water must now be treated and 60 percent of water recycled - developments that he said were spurring concessions for new plants.
As for pricing changes, after years of heavily subsidizing water consumption across the board, municipalities from Osaka to Los Angeles are considering tiered-pricing plans for water and sanitation. While there is a general trend to maintain universal access to basic water services at little or no cost, all other levels of service - be it a homeowner's sprinkler system or a semiconductor maker's water-processing system - will be subject to fees based on the amount of water consumed.
A report published in March 2007 by the Earth Policy Institute showed municipal water rates increasing over a five-year period by an average of 27 percent in the United States, 32 percent in Britain, 45 percent in Australia, 50 percent in South Africa and 58 percent in Canada.
Publicly held companies like Groupe Danone of France began deploying advanced wastewater treatment processes a few years ago as a means of reducing consumption levels and therefore limiting their risk exposure to expensive and potentially disruptive water shortages, while bolstering their corporate image.
According to Jean-Pierre Rennaud, environment director at Danone, all its factories now treat their wastewater. The company, a leading producer of dairy products and bottled water, has already reduced its water consumption by 30 percent.
Meena Palaniappan, a senior research associate and project director at the Pacific Institute, a research group in Oakland, California, contends that pricing overhauls - though complicated to enact - are garnering broad-based support among policy makers, municipalities and industrial players. They help cover infrastructure costs and foster greater private-sector involvement, while raising public awareness about the value of water.
Citing a recent water main rupture in Chicago, Palaniappan said: "Unless a water main erupts, people don't think about water. It's easy to ignore, because right now you can turn on your tap."

Good news (within limits) for Indian farmers—and bad news for the IPCC

Glaciers and the IPCC-The Economist

Full Credit to The Economist

Some major issues:

1. Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck, explains that a timescale of centuries, not decades, is far more plausible for the Himalaya.
2. To melt a glacier at an altitude above 6,000 metres, where many of the Himalayan glaciers are found, requires a lot more warming than can be expected by 2035—a point made forcefully in a letter to Science by Dr Kaser and others, published this week. Jeff Kargel of the University of Arizona, one of its authors, stresses that its criticism is aimed at this specific claim, not at the IPCC in general, and should not be seen as undermining the panel’s conclusions.
3. Meanwhile, the future of water resources in the places served by the glaciers remains unclear. Glaciers in monsoonal climates, unlike high-latitude glaciers, gain mass from precipitation during the same warm season in which they lose mass from melting, which makes their behaviour complex. And there are other water-related questions to be addressed, including possible changes to the monsoons and massive depletion of groundwater. There is an urgent need to study these things, and to synthesise the results in a way that can be relied on.

Cascading Development in Hydro Power Projects

The Unsustainable Goal to "Convert every drop of river water into MW" makes the downstream stretch dry and eventually turns the river into "Isolated pool of water".

The issue needs utmost attention of policy makers as more and more cascading projects are coming up in the Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Sikkim.

These days, as many as 50% New Projects discussed at MOEF are located in Arunachal Pradesh alone.

Some Major Points:

• River should get free stretch between one FRL and another TWL for its natural flow.
• Project Specific Lean season EFR (Environmental flow) should be worked out in terms of discharge(in m^3/s) that should be released for downstream uses including sustenance of aquatic life adopting a scientific approach.
• Basin planning is a MUST and it has already been started by NHPC and other proponents in the North East region.
• EIA Notification 2006 is silent on the far downstream of the TWL. The Act's purview is limited upto 10 KM radius. Say, for example, Kaziranga National Park located 15 Kms downstream (radius) of a project's TWL, what remedy(EIA/EMP) can we have?Should there be a separate Impact Analysis for this kind of National Calamity?
  
• Refer to Minutes of EAC of MoEF at http://164.100.194.13:8080/ssdn1/
• environmental-flows -EFR
  

http://www.climatecooling.org/

http://www.climatecooling.org/

PM for creation of Solar Valleys across the country

PM for creation of Solar Valleys across the country

As part of efforts to combat climate change, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday advocated creation of Solar Valleys in India on the lines of Silicon Valleys and asked industrial houses to view the Solar Mission as a huge business opportunity.

Launching the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission "Solar India", he said its success has the potential of transforming India's energy prospects, while contributing to national as well as global efforts to combat climate change. The role of industry in this Mission that set an ambitious target to generate 20,000 MW of solar generating capacity by the end of 13th Five Year Plan, would be critical. "Eventually, if the ambitious roll out of the Mission is to become a reality, we will have to create many Solar Valleys on the lines of the Silicon Valleys that are spurring our IT industry across the four corners of the country," Singh told the gathering which included Union Ministers Sharad Pawar, Farooq Abdullah and Jairam Ramesh. Noting that these valleys would become hubs for solar science, engineering and research, fabrication and manufacturing, the Prime Minister urged the Indian industry to see the Solar Mission as the "huge business opportunity that it is". Referring to Jawarharlal Nehru's vision to create world-class scientific and technological capabilities in the atomic energy and space sectors, he said it was these strengths that created the Information Technology revolution in the country and made it a global player. "I am convinced that solar energy can be the next scientific and industrial frontier in India after Atomic Energy, Space and IT", he said. The Prime Minister said though the Mission's target of 20,000 MW was ambitious, it was "doable and we should work single-mindedly to achieve it as a priority national endeavour". He said various ministries and authorities would have to work in tandem in order to make the Mission a success. The Mission should evolve as a single national platform for coordination among scientific, industrial and regulatory establishments in a synergetic manner. Increased use of solar energy was a central component of government's strategy to bring about a strategic shift from the current reliance on fossil fuels to a pattern of sustainable growth based on renewable and clean sources of energy, Singh said. He hoped that the Mission would also establish India as a global leader in solar energy, not just in terms of solar power generation but also in solar manufacturing and technology. Noting that solar energy in its decentralised and distributed applications is already beginning to light the lives of tens of millions of India's energy-poor people, he said the rapid spread of solar lighting systems, solar water pumps and other solar power-based rural applications could change the face of rural energy sector. "We intend to significantly expand such applications through the Mission", he said, adding the regulatory and incentive framework would encourage technological innovation and generate economies of scale and lead to steady lowering of costs. Speaking on the occasion, Minister for New and Renewable Energy Farooq Abdullah said though the initial cost of solar energy was very high, the government would aim to bring it down "as quickly as possible" in order to provide power to villages and rural homes. Over the next three years, the NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam (NVVN) would purchase solar power at rates fixed by the Central Regulatory Electricity Commission, he said, adding when the State utilities purchase solar power from NVVN they would get an equivalent amount of thermal power from NVVN. "The bundling of more expensive solar power with cheaper thermal power will enable a much cheaper tariff for the consumer, estimated at about Rs five or less per unit," he said. Abdullah said that the government wanted to install 20 million solar lights by 2022, which would save about one billion litres of kerosene a year and was working with banks, especially rural banks, to offer soft loans to consumers. He said the government also proposed to provide upto 90 per cent support for setting up solar power plants in island States and border areas. In other solar applications, the government was considering proposals for providing upto 30 per cent grant-in-aid, he added.

Free Pubs list - January 2010

Free Pubs list - January 2010

We're ringing in the new year with a new Free Pubs list! As always, to request one of the titles below, send an email to wrcaill@library.berkeley.edu with the subject line "Free pubs request." Please include your name, mailing address, and the full detail of each item requested. Note that due to postage costs international requests are limited to two items per posting. Those local are encouraged to visit WRCA to pick up items. This list will be continually updated through the month of January, crossing off titles as they are requested. Though not required, reimbursement for the postage to mail these items is always appreciated. Checks can be made out to "UC Regents" and mailed to 410 O'Brien Hall + Berkeley, CA + 94720-1718.
Free Pubs list - January 2010

Ministry insists on accreditation for EIA reports

Chakrabarti added that accreditation is required as the number of consultants in the business is increasing rapidly

Padmaparna Ghosh

New Delhi: Consultants who carry out studies on the impact of an industrial or infrastructure project on the environment will now need to be registered and accredited with the ministry of environment.
The move is aimed at improving the quality and integrity of so-called environmental impact assessment (EIA) reports and the ministry has said that after June, it will not accept reports from unaccredited consultants.
Also Read Are the govt’s green clearances a farce?
Govt rejects Balco expansion plans
Public hearing: a mere formality?
Forest ministry rebuts coal claims; says shoddy reports delay approval
Govt asks Jindal to reconvene meet with locals
Port projects to undertake cumulative impact study
In a series of articles, Mint had written about consultants passing off environmental impact reports of industrial projects in the US and Russia as those specifically created for projects in India. In some cases, the consultants had not even bothered to change minor details, such as the kind of flora and fauna found in the area near the project.
“The Quality Council of India (QCI) and the National Accreditation Board of Education and Training (Nabet) will undertake the process (of accreditation). Consultants, in the past, have written these reports without adequate expertise,” said a senior official, who did not want to be identified.
Apart from cut-and-paste, some of the reports are guilty of inadequacy.
Projects above a specified size, including those in areas such as mining, thermal and hydroelectric power generation, infrastructure, and roads have to mandatorily go through the environmental clearance process, which is based on EIA reports and a public hearing for affected people. The clearances are given either by the state or the Union government depending on the size of the project.
The accreditation scheme isn’t entirely new. It existed earlier although as a voluntary measure.
“As this is now a requirement, we have been getting a lot of calls,” said Vipin Sahni, director of Nabet. The voluntary accreditation scheme saw just around 10 companies getting themselves registered in the last two years.
“There are an estimated 400-450 consultants operating in this area. But the majority of projects (80% of reports) are done by the top-most organizations, which may number between 60 and 70,” added Sahni.
According to Nabet guidelines, a consultant seeking accreditation needs a minimum experience of seven years in the relevant sector and should have been involved in preparing at least three EIA reports in the sector.
Tapan Chakrabarti, acting director of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute in Nagpur, one of the biggest consultants in the area and which authors approximately 40 such reports a year across sectors, welcomed the ministry’s move. “There are certain fly-by-night organizations in India, who have done such studies without even field visits. I have seen reports like these. For instance, one such report said that the river water was free from any bacteria or coliform. River water cannot be like bottled mineral water.”
Chakrabarti added that accreditation is required as the number of consultants in the business is increasing rapidly.
“This time we will get feedback from stakeholders and the MoEF (ministry of environment and forests). We are trying to make it transparent and it will be faster, as the accreditation process will be online,” said Sahni.
Nabet and QCI will also conduct an annual review of the consultants to verify compliance and reserve the right to suspend the accreditation.
Activists, however, aren’t happy with just the accreditation. They want defaulters to be permanently blacklisted.
“Consistently, consultants have produced shoddy EIA reports. For a very long time, people have asked for blacklisting of such organizations, but this hasn’t been included,” said Kanchi Kohli, member of Kalpvriksh Environment Support Group, an activist organization.
The story so far
18 July 2009: Port projects to undertake cumulative impact study
7 May 2009: Citizens have right to participate in public hearing: HC
9 September 2008: Ground zero of the fight between conservationists, forest dwellers
4 August 2008: Forest ministry rebuts coal claims; says shoddy reports delay approval
11 February 2008: Public hearing: a mere formality?
1 January 2008: Govt rejects Balco expansion plans
27 December 2007: Are the govt’s green clearances a farce?

Convergence of MoWR schemes with NREGA

http://www.nrega.net/csd/water/field-initiatives/MoWR%20schemes.pdf

file size:3 MB

http://www.nrega.net/search?SearchableText=MoWR