Quality Water To Be Century’s Biggest Environmental Challenge, UA Biologist Predicts

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Talk of arresting violators of Birmingham’s outdoor watering ban may sound strange now, but a University of Alabama water quality expert says water shortages will become an increasingly visible issue in this country and around the globe.

“The single greatest environmental problem that we’ll have in the 21st century is the availability of quality fresh water,” said Dr. Robert Wetzel, Bishop Professor of Biological Sciences at UA.

“There will be wars fought over fresh water. That’s already happening in the Middle East,” said Wetzel, one of the world’s leading experts on the crucial relationships between water and land and co-author of the book, “To Quench Our Thirst,” which details many of the challenges related to the nation’s freshwater resources.

While the Lake Purdy reservoir’s low water level is blamed on this summer’s drought, Wetzel said long-term weather predictions do not look promising and, besides that, the long- term, global water problem is more complex than abnormally dry weather alone.

“One of the long-term predictions is that this type of drier weather pattern will continue for another five to 10 years,” Wetzel said. “But one of the biggest problems we have is that water is taken for granted. It’s not used very efficiently. If it were valued properly and if it were used efficiently, we could have consumption without any appreciable sacrifice of our standard of living.”

Physiologically, humans need about two liters of water daily to survive. However Wetzel said on average, including the water used by agriculture and industry in producing food and goods, about 1,500 to 3,000 liters of water are used per person each day.

The three primary uses of water are agricultural, industrial and domestic use. “Eighty-five percent of our water use, worldwide, is in irrigation of agriculture,” Wetzel said. “In this country, it’s about 50 percent of our use.” The United States, in comparison to many countries, is water-rich, but it needs to follow the examples of others in how to use its water more efficiently.

“In America, we are spoiled rotten, but there are millions of people dying every year because of limited water availability or poor quality water, which contains water-borne pathogens. Two billion people globally do not have water that is at an acceptable quality level for reasonable health.”

From an agricultural standpoint, the United States’ primary irrigation system is a spray system that wastes much water to evaporation. “In Israel, for example, the people water their plants, not the air and ground, by using drip irrigation,” Wetzel said. Evaporation loss using this method is only 10 percent while in spray irrigation about 50 percent is lost to evaporation.

Much of industry’s water use is in cooling, and it is wasteful to use drinking quality water in these efforts, Wetzel said. “We don’t need water as pure as what we take out of the tap to cool a machine.” Cooling water can often be efficiently recycled internally. Another possible way to reduce water consumption is to look at Sweden’s vacuum type sewage system where only 1 liter of water is used with each toilet flush. “If your sewage is concentrated, you can deal with it more efficiently.”

Within the next century, more people may have to reconsider the wisdom behind pouring water onto their lawns for added greenery. “A brown lawn isn’t that bad,” Wetzel said. In portions of the West, yards are often decorated with landscaping stones, as opposed to grass, and plants which require little water, such as cacti, are used.

There are also many ludicrous proposals bantered about as solutions for the world’s water quality problems. Talk of transporting glaciers to low water areas or piping water hundreds of miles are not feasible because of high energy consumption, Wetzel said.

As the world’s population continues to grow, water problems such as Birmingham is experiencing this summer, will grow along with it — even in the absence of severe droughts. Water-rich areas, like Tuscaloosa, will feel the pinch also, Wetzel predicts.

“Some projections indicate that within 30 years Tuscaloosa County’s population will be near 300,000. Where is the water going to come from?” Wetzel asked. “The amount of available water is a finite amount. You can only expand the use of it so far. Technology is not the solution; technology is the problem.”

The International Water Academy recently elected Wetzel to a lifetime membership, one of only 500 memberships the Academy has awarded to water educators, scientists, water administrators and economists worldwide. The Academy cites as its vision the fostering of a community of experts to aid in the management and use of water for the benefit of all mankind. In August, the Society of Wetland Scientists presented Wetzel with its Lifetime Achievement Award. That group is dedicated to the conservation, management and scientific understanding of the world’s wetland resources.