What are we going to do?

I could tell you that by cutting down your shower time, not leaving the tap running when you brush your teeth and  living by the rule"If its yellow let it mellow, if its brown flush it down", the water crisis would be solved. But it's not that simple...

Sure if everyone makes these small changes, the crisis might ease by a slight bit, but the water shortage crisis is MUCH greater than that. Not only is it impacted by our everyday routines, but more so by all our industrial and agricultural practises. Solving the water problem would mean completely reinventing our way of life, and most are not so inclined to do that...

There are however solutions that allow us to continue living the way we have been for so many years while still being water conservative.

Agriculture being the main use of fresh water on this planet has developed new technologies to help minimise its huge consumption:

1. Drip Irrigation: use of plastic tubing on and beneath  the surface to deliver water directly to plant roots in small quantities. There is no evaporation involved in this technique, and the costs to implement it are coming down.
2. Low Pressure Spraying: for grain crops, uses 30% less water than conventional spraying.
3. Timed Irrigation: Applying small quantities of water just in time to alleviate severe crop drought.
4. New Water: use of reclaimed waste water to water golf courses and parks. Deals with water scarcity and water pollution issues.

As these new technologies may be part of the solution, they still encourage us to stick to our agricultural ways of mass production, and mass distribution which also consumes a large amounts of water for the oil needed to transport these food products across the world. If we were to re-invent our agricultural methods all together and go back to local farming practises we would be able to produce more nutritional products in an environmentally sound way.

Others are considering desalination as a viable option. Desalination is a process which removes salt from the water, meaning that once we've used up all the fresh water, we can begin taking water from our oceans! I would like to think that human kind isn't that lazy! That we could find methods to conserve the freshwater we have instead of taking over greater bodies of water and continuing our vicious cycle of over consumption.

Solutions to the water crisis are vast and ever-changing. What it really comes down to is how much we are willing to "sacrifice" to save this precious resource.