Water scarcity

About: Water scarcity is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11579 publications have been published within this topic receiving 228756 citations. The topic is also known as: water shortage.

Water quality of the Ganga River – An overview

Abstract: The Ganga is not only a holy river, but also a lifeline of a large population of India, as it covers more than 26% of the country's area in its basin in the north and drains 25% of the annual run-off. Fast urbanization, industrialization and steep demand for water have led to serious problems of water quality degradation. Water quality monitoring indicated that the river is polluted in some of the segments, the worst affected lying between Kannauj and Allahabad, approximately 350 km long. About 12,222 million litres per day (mld) of domestic and 2500 mld of industrial wastewater is generated in the entire basin, out of which about 2573 mld of wastewater is generated along its bank. Many of its tributaries are heavily polluted and the main water quality issues are, organic pollution indicated by BOD and pathogens indicated by coliform count. There is a fluctuating trend of water quality attributed to the flow conditions in the river which depend on rainfall and water abstraction. In view of water scarcity ...

An Internet of Things-Based Model for Smart Water Management

Abstract: Water is a vital resource for life, and for the economy. Nowadays, one of the most serious challenges to solve is to manage the water scarcity. Current water management ICT systems are supported by specific vendor equipment, without considering any interoperability standards. The lack of standardization among producer's water ICT equipment hinders proper monitoring and control systems, resulting in low efficiency in water distribution and consumption, system's maintenance and improvement, and failure identification. In this paper we propose a smart water management model integrating Internet of Things technologies for decoupling decision support systems and monitoring from business processes coordination and subsystem implementation. The proposed smart water management model makes specific vendor equipment interoperable and manageable in a water management domain in a homogeneous way.

Water, Technology, and Development: Transformations of Development Technonatures in Changing Waterscapes:

Abstract: Delivering safe drinking water is often equated with delivering development in much of the Global South. Yet different arrangements of technologies, waters, and social relations constitute uneven waterscapes and produce different water — society relations across sites and scales. Analyzing the contradictory roles of water-producing technologies and differentiated waters in enabling and challenging processes of development thus becomes important to explaining the political ecologies of development. In order to investigate the technonatural relations of power that constitute development, I look at the ways that different types of waters, water technologies, nature (aquifers, groundwater, arsenic), and power relations coproduce water (in)securities and (un)healthy development subjects, with a case study from waterscapes of the Bengal Delta. Contaminated tubewells have resulted in a drinking water crisis and a reconfiguration of hydro — social relations. Groundwater usage for drinking water purposes was intro...

Soil Salinisation and Salt Stress in Crop Production

Abstract: For optimal grow and development, cultivated plants require balanced presence of water and dissolved minerals (salts) in their rhizosphere. In that respect, quality and availability of two natural resources, water and soils, are crucial in cultivation. Although Earth abounds in water, an almost negligible portion (~2.5% or 35 million km3) is fresh or with low salt concentration ( 90% in many developing countries) of total water withdrawal to produce ~36% of global food (Howell, 2001). According to recent estimates (ICID, 2009), almost 300 million ha in the world are irrigated, with ~2/3 of that in most populated and the fast growing Asian countries. In many irrigated agricultural areas, especially in developing countries, water scarcity is pronounced because of environmental conditions (e.g. arid and semiarid climate zones) and the rising population (i.e. food demand). As a consequence, there is an increasing trend of innappropriate use of restricted water (e.g. over/pumping of salinised aquifers) and continuous degradation of land resources (e.g. salt-affected soils), representing a large burden to human food supply and natural ecosystems. Some of the most produced and widely used crops in human/animal nutrition such as cereals (rice, maize), forages (clover) or horticultural crops (potatoes, tomatoes) usually require irrigation practices, but are relatively susceptible to excessive concentration of salts either dissolved in irrigation water or present in soil (rhizosphere) solution. In a majority of cultivated plants, yields start declining even at relatively low salinity in irrigation water (ECw>0.8 dS/m) (e.g. Ayers & Westcot, 1994) or soil (ECse>1 dS/m in saturated soil extracts) (see Table 1 in Chinnusamy et al., 2005). Increased soil salinity may induce various primary and secondary salt stress effects in cultivated plants (section 4.3.1). Salt stress as one of the most widespread abiotic constraints in food production may also result in the negative ecological, social and/or economic outcomes. For instance, recent deposition of toxic salt sediments and sea intrusion in tsunami-affected areas of Maldives damaged >70% of agriculture land, destroyed >370, 000 fruit trees and affected around 15, 000 farmers, with 2 costs estimated at around AU$6.5 million (FAO, 2005). Successful remediation of saltdegraded areas for crop production, besides using relatively salt-tolerant species/genotypes, is highly dependent on sustainable management practices that are usually costly, time consuming and may be difficult or impossible to implement fully in certain ecological situations (e.g. seepage soil salinity ; section 3.1). Accordingly, in response to the salinity issue, Australia’s National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality from 2000, resulted in investments of about AU$1.4 billion over 7 years to support actions by communities and land managers in salt-affected regions (Williams, 2010). However, recent advances in plant breeding and molecular biology technologies suggest that increasing salt tolerance in cultivated plants could be one of the most promising and effective strategies for food production in salt-affected environments.