The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago surveyed 1,202 American adults in November 2018 about climate change, a carbon tax and fuel efficiency standards. The survey found that the majority of Americans think climate change is a reality and human activities are the primary cause. Forty-four percent of those who accept that it’s […]
Like many agricultural products, the commercial cultivation of cannabis has an impact on water use and wildlife in its practices. A new academic research center launched in January 2019 at UC Berkeley aims to “look at how cannabis production affects the environment and society, and how these effects will evolve under new regulations following the […]
Avocados have health benefits and there’s no question that they taste good, but are they sustainable? Probably not. Avocado production is very water-intensive – 60 gallons (227 liters) of water per avocado – and the trees take 10 years to bear fruit. A lot of US avocado supplies come from Mexico where 20,000 hectares of forest […]
The world’s watersheds are made up of rivers of all sizes, from small intermittent springs to major rivers like the Mighty Mississippi. When seen together they look like a circulatory system, and indeed they do bring life to our world. UK geographer Szűcs Róbert created a series of maps that divide the planet’s watersheds into colorful catchment […]
The New York Times has a series of graphs that show how each state produced its electricity from 2001 to 2017, by percentage of power produced from each energy source. Why is this important on to a site about water footprints? Because we account for the water footprint of energy in our calculations of your water […]
Drinking water quality in the United States is not improving. Rather, people are confronted with water that has elevated levels of harmful compounds like lead, nitrates and bacteria among other contaminants. Such drinking water deprivations are especially true for people who live in vulnerable, disadvantaged communities, as highlighted by two recent reports. The first paper […]
Many shifts are apparent as climate change grips the Earth, from higher average temperatures, to rising sea levels to reduced snowpack, but one water resource-related impact that has been less understood is groundwater. Harnessing new readings and data models, a recent study was published in Nature Climate Change, which found that in many places around […]
The federal government runs more than 700 telemetry stations in high-mountain watersheds in 13 Western states. The stations deliver vital data about water supply, which is fed into climate models. Using the data, the models have predicted a decline in Western snowpack and earlier spring melting, which would not only put water supplies at risk […]
Henry Fountain and Ben C. Solomon of the New York Times went to Kazakhstan to document the effects of climate change on Tuyuksu glacier. There are approximately 150,000 glaciers that cover about 200,000 square miles of the earth’s surface. Over the last 40 years, they’ve lost the equivalent of a layer of ice 70 feet thick. Some, in […]
