💧 Are We Solving the Right Water Problem?
Article 8 of my Water Stress series is now up, and this one started with a conversation with a farmer.
He is spending around £750,000 turning one of his fields into a reservoir so he can store water for periods when there isn't enough rain.
As we stood there, he told me that 32mm of rain had fallen across his 5,000-acre farm in just two hours.
That works out at something approaching 650 million litres of water.
The rain had watered everything: crops, fields, trees, hedgerows and wildflowers. No irrigation pipes had to be moved. No pumps were running. No energy was consumed.
But there was too much water, too quickly. Some newly laid crops were actually lifted from the soil.
And later in the year, there may not be enough.
That contradiction is at the heart of this article.
We need to get better at moving water through time — keeping some of the water that arrives during wet periods until we need it during dry ones.
But how?
I look at everything from farm reservoirs, ponds, wetlands, soils and aquifers to the much bigger infrastructure being proposed here in Hampshire, including the controversial plans to recycle wastewater, pump it to Havant Thicket Reservoir and eventually move water towards where it is needed.
I'm not trying to decide that one solution is right and another wrong. Instead, I think we need to get much better at asking:
Are we solving the right water problem — and have we properly compared the alternatives?
How much reliable water does each provide? What does it cost? How much energy and carbon does it require? What happens to wildlife and the landscape? What happens if it fails? And could a solution solve several problems at the same time?
One idea kept coming back to me:
Slow it. Spread it. Sink it. Store it.
Perhaps before finding increasingly complicated ways of creating and moving more water, we should get much better at looking after the water that already falls on us.
Then come back and tell us what you think — and particularly share examples of places that are already doing this differently. Finding those solutions and asking “Could we do that here?” is exactly what Has2BGreen is about.
🌍 Global problems. Local consequences. Shared solutions.
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💧 Are We Solving the Right Water Problem?
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