News Briefs

News briefs and articles about water footprints, water use and availability, as well as interviews with key people in the fields of water footprints and water use.

Your Water Footprint? It’s as Important as Your Carbon Footprint

November 14, 2018

As important as your carbon footprint is, you must not forget your water footprint. What often happens is that people focus on the water they use directly from the faucet, and don’t realize their large use of “virtual water,” or all water that goes into the food, consumer goods and energy they consume every day. […]

Rivers in the Sky: How Deforestation Is Affecting Global Water Cycles

November 13, 2018

Trees are an active part of the water cycle – they suck water out of the ground through their roots and release water vapor into the atmosphere through pores in their foliage. En masse, they create giant rivers of water in the air that form clouds and create rainfall hundreds or even thousands of miles […]

New Indirect Potable Reuse Project Comes To Southwest

November 9, 2018

Arizona has been reusing wastewater since the 1920’s, but new rules permitting direct potable reuse make it possible for utilities to plan new drinking water projects.  Treated wastewater would have to go through “a multistage, multi-barrier treatment process with controls, real-time monitoring, a whole lot of microbial monitoring and chemical monitoring,” according to hydrogeologist Chuck Graf. […]

In Water-Stressed West, an Old Water Efficiency Metric Needs a Reboot

November 7, 2018

Residential water management has long been measured by houses served per acre-foot, or the amount of water it takes to cover one acre a foot deep in water. This has been especially important in the West because water isn’t always in great supply in western portions of the United States. The standard has been changing […]

Reducing Your Carbon — and Water — Footprint Still Matters

November 5, 2018

In recent weeks, a number of environmentally minded political pundits have stated that voting for enlightened politicians is the sole way to change direction and policy towards a more sustainable society, particularly when it comes to climate action. In a Slate article, two social psychology researchers review the science and show that norm changes — […]

The Precarious Plan for the Lake Powell Pipeline

October 31, 2018

Gabriel Lozada, a theoretical mathematician at the University of Utah and a pro bono consultant for the Utah Rivers Council, suspected that government officials were overstating the benefits and ignoring potential costs of a water supply pipeline that would take water Colorado River out of Lake Powell to southern Utah. So Lozada built a mathematical […]

Scientists Identify Global Water Hotspots And Recommend Cooperative Resolution

October 29, 2018

Scientists at the European Union’s Joint Research Centre completed a study that identified potential zones of freshwater conflict and developed strategies to boost cooperation between affected countries. Because competition over limited water resources remains a chief concern that can create and worsen political tensions, instability and societal unrest, attention to such factors as climate change […]

Massive Scale Evaporative Water Losses from Irrigation

October 19, 2018

A new study evaluating evapotranspiration trends in California published in Water Resources Research by Szilagyi and Jozsa used a modeling approach called “the complementary relationship of evaporation,” which predicts evapotranspiration without needing detailed information on the Earth’s surface using observations of the humidity of the lower atmosphere. The study demonstrated that irrigated regions had sustained […]