Water Tomorrow: Learning Today

It’s very hot in lots of places this summer, including much of America. Record highs in Alaska. At least 24 people dead in Phoenix, mostly elderly, homeless or both, attributed to the heat. Terrorist bombs aren’t the only killers of the innocent.

It’s not clear if global heating is figured into their estimates, but the United Nations agency Unesco estimates that in the next twenty years the average amount of water available per person on planet earth will shrink by a third. Today, more than a billion people can’t count on safe drinking water. By 2050, at least two billion people, and perhaps as many as seven billion, will be short of water.

"No region will be spared from the impact of this crisis," Koichiro Matsuura, director general of Unesco, recently said. "Water supplies are falling while the demand is dramatically growing."

But Unesco is working at the grassroots level to apply a fairly simple technology to identify water sources and help communities manage them sustainably.

The method called isotope hydrology is described this way in a story in the New York Times:

"Cheap and reliable, it takes advantage of the fact that water molecules carry unique fingerprints, based in part on differing proportions of the oxygen and hydrogen isotopes that constitute all water. Isotopes are forms of the same element that have variable numbers of neutrons in their nuclei.

Using the tools of isotope hydrology, scientists can discover the age, origins, size, flow and fate of a water source. And that information, in turn, can guide sound water-use policy, letting water engineers better map underground aquifers, conserve supplies and control pollution.”

It also is not expensive to use. Unesco spends about $2 million a year on research and another $5 million (not billion) in aid, which includes training local practitioners. There are 84 such ongoing projects in 50 countries, including Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Morocco and Senegal. The Times story indicates it has had particular success in Ethiopia.