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Peter Gleick: Water and population. 2

Posted by: Maven on October 22, 2009 at 4:43 pm

From Peter Gleick at the City Brights blog:

“In a previous post here, I raised the population and water issue in a general way. My point was that ignoring the population component of our resource challenges was a mistake, certainly in the long term and in some places, in the short term. I think this is indisputable — resource constraints are worse than they would otherwise be if populations are large and growing rapidly rather than small and growing slowly, or even shrinking.

I also made the point, which I repeat here, that addressing water problems in the face of population growth comes down to three choices: (1) increase the water supply, (2) decrease the water demand per person, and (3) change the number of people. We must do all three, in the right way.

Over the past 100 years, our water policy has focused on (1) — expand supply. Even today, some people cannot imagine any other approach to water, and so we get the knee-jerk calls for new dams in California, even when they cannot be shown to provide the solutions we need. Some people just cannot imagine any other approach. In many parts of the world, expanding supply is still critically important, but ultimately, supply is limited (by either the availability of water, or by its ultimate economic and ecological costs) if demand is not constrained. Sure, desalination is effectively unlimited — at least for rich, coastal communities. But desalination is not an option for the vast majority of our water use, which is for agriculture, far from our coasts. There are true limits to supply. …”

Read more from Peter Gleick’s blog post by clicking here.

October 22, 2009 · Filed Under Development & Population

Comments

One Response to “Peter Gleick: Water and population. 2”

  1. Wes Rolley on October 22nd, 2009 9:30 pm

    Gleick needs to be careful. Limbaugh will come after him in the same manner that he has gone after NY Times Andrew Revkin.

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