South Korea : W125 Billion to Be Spent on Fighting Drought (Google / Korea Times)

Read at : Google Alert – drought

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2008/10/116_33033.html

W125 Billion to Be Spent on Fighting Drought

By Kang Hyun-kyung
Staff Reporter

The government unveiled a 125-billion-won plan Tuesday to counter prolonged drought that has troubled households in 17 cities and counties in three southern and mid-western provinces. Prime Minister Han Seung-soo convened a special Cabinet meeting to discuss the deleterious weather effects on the agriculture sector and farmers in South Gyeongsang, South Jeolla and North Chungcheong provinces. The heads of five relevant ministries including the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs and the Ministry of Environment attended the meeting. Prime Minister Han called on the five ministers to take immediate and effective measures to help 21,283 households suffering drinking water shortages, as well as the negative effects of drought on crops.

China : 78,000 short of drinking water in Hunan (Google / Rednet.cn)

Read at : Google Alert – drought

http://news.rednet.cn/c/2008/10/22/1617168.htm

Drought leaves 78,000 short of drinking water in Hunan

Editor:Sharon Lee
Source:中国日报网
Updated: 2008-10-22 9:26:55

CHANGSHA – Authorities in central China are considering closing polluting factories and opening a large reservoir to ease a drought that has left 78,000 rural people short of drinking water. An emergency plan to handle the water shortage was being drawn up, the Hunan Provincial Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters said on Tuesday. Hunan’s main Xiangjiang River saw levels at 26 meters at 8 a.m. on Tuesday in the provincial capital, Changsha. The level was 2.64 meters lower than the average for the time of year. Key industries would be temporarily closed to reduce pollution in the river, the headquarters said. Preparations were also being made to divert water from the Dongjiang reservoir upstream.

Water management in Siketi – Clean water and university studies (SFSA)

Read at : Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA)

http://www.syngentafoundation.com/eritrea_water_management_siketi.htm

Sustainable Land Management

Water management in Siketi – Clean water and university studies

By Christian Bernhart

In 2003 for the first time, nearly 5000 residents of Siketi are drawing healthy drinking water from eight standpipes in the village. The collaborators in this project, which includes a reservoir, pumping system and supply pipes, were the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture and the Center for Development and Environment (CDE) of the University of Bern, as part of their joint project for sustainable land management in Eritrea (SLM), which also has geography students at the University of Asmara conducting their own field studies.

Somalia: Plea for Help As Drought Pushes People Towards Urban Centres (Google / allAfrica)

Read at : Google Alert – drought

http://allafrica.com/stories/200804281225.html

Somalia: Plea for Help As Drought Pushes People Towards Urban Centres

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks

28 April 2008

Nairobi

Local leaders in central Somalia have appealed for help as the severe drought being experienced in the region is forcing many nomads who lost their livestock – the principal means of survival – to abandon their homes and move to urban centres. “In the last two weeks, 500 families have arrived from rural areas after losing their animals,” said Abdullahi Moalim Abdi, an official of Save Somali Women and Children, an NGO that works in Adado district of Galgadud region. He said people were still leaving the rural areas. “We had at least two dozen families arrive today [28 April] and they look very bad,” Abdi said. Ali Gedi, a 70-year-old resident of Adado, 620km north of Mogadishu, told IRIN that the lack of water was the biggest problem the people faced.

Israel : drought and water supplies (Google / Haaretz)

Read at : Google Alert – drought

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/976535.html

Water Authority: Drought years threaten drinking water supplies

By Zafrir Rinat, Haaretz Correspondent

Israel stands to lose large amounts of drinking water due to poor quality and problems associated with drought years, according to the Water Authority. Among the threats to water quality, cowsheds in the south have been found to cause groundwater pollution, and sewage could soon pollute drilled wells in the Western Galilee. The Water Authority official in charge of quality, Sarah Elhanani, last week presented statistics at an emergency conference on water at the Agriculture Ministry’s Beit Dagan facility: It emerged that the coastal aquifer, one of the two largest in the country, is fast becoming saline. Seventy years ago the quality of the water drawn from 80 percent of the area of the aquifer was defined as good; today, only 40 percent is so defined.

China : drought leaves 670,000 without drinking water (Google / Reuters)

Read at : Google Alert – drought

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSPEK203997
China drought leaves 670,000 without drinking water

BEIJING, April 13 (Reuters) – A drought in China’s northeast Liaoning province has left nearly 700,000 people without drinking water after rainfall in the first three months of 2008 tumbled to one-fifth levels last year, the Xinhua agency said on Sunday.

The area is a top grain producer, and maize and rice farming is due to begin next week, but from January to the end of March it had got less than 2 centimetres (less than an inch) of rain.

Some 66 reservoirs have dried up, but the area has raised cash to build 1,700 new wells and expand and upgrade water conservation systems to try and ensure spring planting can go ahead, Xinhua said, citing local sources.

China’s weather administration said in early April that drought parching other parts of northern China was the worst in several decades and would continue this month.

Drought and floods are perennial problems in China, which has per capita water resources that are well below the global average. Its meteorologists have said global climate change is exacerbating extreme weather, including droughts.

About 30 million Chinese in the countryside and more than 20 million in urban areas face drinking water shortages every year despite huge government investment to address the problem.

Across China, by March 26, 19.4 million hectares (48 million acres) of arable land had been hit by the drought, including 3.3 million hectares (8.15 million acres) of cropland. (Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison; Editing by Bill Tarrant)

Canada : largest freshwater conservation area / EC : Natura 2000 (IISD / EU)

Read at : Linkages Update 2007-12-13

http://www.iisd.ca/media/biodiversity_wildlife.htm#areas

PROTECTED AREAS: CANADA SETS LARGEST FRESHWATER CONSERVATION AREA, EC EXTENDS NATURA 2000 NETWORK

As recently announced by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the largest freshwater protected area was established at Lake Superior, the biggest of the Great Lakes, encompassing more than 10,000 sq. km and including lake bed, islands and north shorelands.
In related news, the European Commission (EC) adopted four decisions that significantly extend the Natura 2000 network of protected areas in four biogeographical regions, concerning the adoption of an initial list of Sites of Community Importance in the Pannonian region in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, and the updating of the existing lists in the Atlantic, Boreal and Continental biogeographical regions.

Links to further information
Reuters News Service, 29 October 2007
EC press release, 13 November 2007

The Seawater Greenhouse

Read at :

http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com/ 

The Seawater Greenhouse

Introduction

 

 

The Seawater Greenhouse is a unique concept which combines natural processes, simple construction techniques and mathematical computer modeling  to provide a low-cost solution to one of the world’s greatest needs – fresh water. The Seawater Greenhouse is a new development that offers sustainable solution to the problem of providing water for agriculture in arid, coastal regions. The process uses seawater to cool and humidify the air that ventilates the greenhouse and sunlight to distill fresh water from seawater. This enables the year round cultivation of high value crops that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to grow in hot, arid regions.

Withdrawing fresh water and seawater intrusion (EMWIS)

Read at :

EMWIS Flash N°49-50, July- August 2007 

 Withdrawing fresh water

Withdrawing fresh water faster than it can be recharged near a coastline results in seawater intrusion. The Mediterranean basin and other similar areas encounter this common, yet serious problem more often than not. Experts in Spain have identified the Mediterranean and south Atlantic coastlines as being the biggest victims of seawater intrusion, the culprit in groundwater pollution in a country that is located on a peninsula. In the EU-funded project SWIMED, researchers aimed to develop an integrated approach combining advanced computational tools and GIS for sustainable water resources management in coastal aquifers of the Mediterranean. Further information on EMWIS website

http://www.emwis.net/thematicdirs/news/snews445125