5.4.09
Water use gathering issues dire warnings
By: Leslie Reed, Omaha World-Herald
LINCOLN — Fifty years.
That's how long before current water and land use practices will lead to a worldwide water crisis, a Harvard University professor told those attending a University of Nebraska-Lincoln conference to begin developing a global water institute.
It isn't so much that the world will run out of water, said Peter Rogers, a professor of environmental engineering. Nebraska, for example, probably has enough water to last several hundred years. Yet water could become so difficult to obtain in some areas that it would touch off a global food crisis.
"Only if we act to improve water use in agriculture will we meet the acute freshwater challenge facing humankind over the coming 50 years," said Jackson.
Solutions were discussed, including improving water and irrigation infrastructure, making irrigation agriculture more efficient and conserving water.
Jeff Raikes, chief executive officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation kicked off the "Future of Water for Food" conference.
More than 200 people, including scientists and policymakers from Nebraska and around the world, attended the $100,000 conference sponsored by the Robert B. Daugherty Charitable Foundation and the University of Nebraska Foundation.
NU President J.B. Milliken said the UNL Water Center already devotes 160 faculty — engineers, hydrologists, economists, lawyers, chemists and others — to water matters.
"We believe it is in a position to do more," he said. "This is the right time and the right place to establish a global water institute."
Raikes, keynote speaker for the conference, said the goals of such an institute would fit with the work of the Gates Foundation in combating global poverty.
With an asset trust endowment of $27.5 billion — including more than $5 billion of an estimated $31 billion pledge from Warren Buffett — the foundation expends about one-fourth of its efforts on global agricultural.
Raikes said the Gates Foundation has set a goal of helping 150 million small farmers around the world triple their incomes by 2025.
"We can all agree that water is a critical challenge, one that we must take on," Raikes told conference participants. "Collectively, you have the power to help hundreds of millions of people move from poverty."
Other speakers emphasized that a tightening water supply is not just a problem for the developing world.
Robert Glennon, a University of Arizona law professor and author of "Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What to Do About It," spoke of threatened water supplies in Nevada, California, Tennessee and Georgia, among other locales. He also told of burgeoning water demands for ethanol production and even to cool computer servers.
James Goeke, a UNL hydrogeologist who has helped map and measure the aquifer system beneath Nebraska and several other states, showed slides demonstrating the proliferation of irrigation wells in Nebraska.
But just as barbed wire fences marked the end of the open range, state law recognizing the relationship between groundwater, rivers and streams is bringing an end to freewheeling irrigation.
"We're closing things down in Nebraska," Goeke said. "Easy access to water is gone."