Peak Water: Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry. How Three Regions Are Coping

Peak Water: Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry. How Three Regions Are Coping: "WIRED
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How to deal withe water crisis
WIRED MAGAZINE: 16.05
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Peak Water: Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry. How Three Regions Are Coping
By Matthew Power Email 04.21.08 | 6:00 PM
Photo: Donald Milne

That the news is familiar makes it no less alarming: 1.1 billion people, about one-sixth of the world s population, lack access to safe drinking water. Aquifers under Beijing, Delhi, Bangkok, and dozens of other rapidly growing urban areas are drying up. The rivers Ganges, Jordan, Nile, and Yangtze — all dwindle to a trickle for much of the year. In the former Soviet Union, the Aral Sea has shrunk to a quarter of its former size, leaving behind a salt-crusted waste.

Water has been a serious issue in the developing world for so long that dire reports of shortages in Cairo or Karachi barely register. But the scarcity of freshwater is no longer a problem restricted to poor countries. Shortages are reaching crisis proportions in even the most highly developed regions, and they re quickly becoming commonplace in our own backyard, from the bleached-white bathtub ring around the Southwest s half-empty Lake Mead to the parched state of Georgia, where the governor prays for rain. Crops are collapsing, groundwater is disappearing, rivers are fa"