Sea Life 16

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Saturday, June 2, 2012

The Global Water Footprint of Key Crops

''The world’s population has surpassed seven billion, and that means more people rely on a finite amount of freshwater. The majority of that water is used in agriculture, and in this interactive we take a look at the impact of some of the most important crops produced for U.S. consumption.

In order to better understand water use and availability trends, scientists divide the Earth’s surface into river basins. This feature examines some of the river basins that are the most important from an agricultural perspective. In each basin, the primary source of water is precipitation. Rain and snow feeds the river and its tributaries, as well as groundwater, ponds, and lakes. Precipitation also adds moisture to the soil, and crops take up the moisture through their roots.

Most crops around the world are grown using only the soil moisture provided by rainfall. When this moisture is insufficient, farmers apply more water through irrigation. Some rain or irrigation water evaporates without benefiting the plant, while some transpires through the plant's tissues during photosynthesis and returns to the atmosphere. Water transformed into vapor in either of these ways is not available for use again in that local area, so in practical terms, it is lost or "consumed."

Different crops have different water needs, which vary with the climate in which they’re grown. Scientists at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have used modeling techniques to estimate the amount of water consumed by the various crops grown in river basins around the world. These are the data we use in this feature.

Fortunately, there are things farmers can do to reduce water consumption. Instead of flooding fields or sprinkling, they can use drip irrigation, which cuts evaporation losses by delivering water directly to the roots of plants. Such techniques are particularly important in dry regions, where heavy water consumption is depleting rivers and even causing some to dry up for portions of the year, as is currently the case with the Colorado, the Indus, the Murray, the Rio Grande, and others.''

See National Geographic's: The Global Water Footprint of Key Crops

Sunday, May 27, 2012

U.S. Bottled Water Sales Are Booming (Again) Despite Opposition

Despite organized anti-bottled-water campaigns across the country and a noisy debate about bottled water’s environmental impact, Americans are buying more bottled water than ever.

In 2011, total bottled water sales in the U.S. hit 9.1 billion gallons — 29.2 gallons of bottled water per person, according to sales figures from Beverage Marketing Corp.

The 2011 numbers are the highest total volume of bottled water ever sold in the U.S., and also the highest per-person volume.

Translated to the handy half-liter size Americans find so appealing, that comes to 222 bottles of water for each person in the country — four bottles of water for every man, woman and child, every week.

Indeed, bottled water sales aren’t just growing — it’s fair to say they’re booming. Volume increased by 4.1 percent in 2011 — five times as fast as the 0.9 percent growth in the sales of beverages overall, according to Beverage Marketing. Bottled water sales, in fact, are growing twice as fast as the economy itself.

“Americans are drinking more bottled water because they find it convenient, appealing and also healthy,” says Gary Hemphill, who is managing director for information services at Beverage Marketing, and a longtime observer of bottled water and beverage sales in the U.S. and around the world.

The resurgence of bottled water — sales dropped in 2008 for the first time in 31 years, and again in 2009, tracking declines in overall drink sales because of the recession — may be surprising given the debate about its value as a product in the last five years.

The record sales year comes as more than a dozen colleges and universities have taken the extraordinary step of banning sale of bottled water on campus, often under pressure from student organizing campaigns that encourage students to drink tap water.

Just last week, Loyola University in Chicago announced it would stop selling bottled water in cafeterias and on-campus stores this fall, and remove bottled water from vending machines starting in 2013. Loyola joins at least 15 other schools in the U.S. and Canada in banning bottled water sales, including the University of Vermont, Washington University, DePauw University, and Harvard’s School of Public Health.

At least four major municipalities — New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago’s Cook County — have banned use of government funds to purchase bottled water.

Despite the record amount of water sold — 2011 beat out the previous, pre-recession year of 2007, when volume was 8.8 billion gallons — 2011 was not a record year in dollar sales of bottled water.

At retail, Americans spent $21.7 billion on bottled water in 2011, just under 2007’s spending.

The big three bottled water companies — Coke, Pepsi and Nestlé — have been discounting water heavily in the last few years, to sustain sales through the recession and the growing opposition.

“Pricing in this category has been aggressive,” says Hemphill, “which has helped.”

Although the U.S. has among the safest tap water in the world, the U.S. remains the largest market for bottled water. The next two, in order, are China and Mexico, both countries in which tap water is either unavailable, or typically not considered safe to drink.

The increase in Americans’ consumption of bottled water is extraordinary — the growth having more in common with digital-era products than typical consumer products.

As recently as 2001, per person consumption of bottled water was just 18.2 gallons per person.

Despite the size and visibility of the business, the amount of water actually sold is relatively tiny, compared to tap water volumes. U.S. water utilities supply more than 1 billion gallons of tap water an hour, every hour of the day.

The total amount of water in the bottles Americans buy in a year would only supply U.S. tap water needs from midnight until 9 a.m. on January 1.

Source: National Geographic

Long Island’s Drinking Water – Challenges and Solutions

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Climate Talks Stall with Nations 'Wasting Time'

The meeting in Bonn, Germany saw angry exchanges between rich nations, fast-industrialising ones and those prone to climate impacts.

Campaigners spoke of a "coalition of the unwilling" including the US, China, India and several Gulf states.

Developing countries are also concerned about the lack of firm pledges on finance beyond the end of this year.

This was the first negotiating meeting since last December's ministerial summit in Durban, South Africa.

The key outcome there was an agreement to begin talks leading to a new global deal involving all nations.

The "Durban Platform", as it is known, will see the agreement tied up by 2015 and coming into force by 2020.

Opening the Bonn session, UN climate convention (UNFCCC) executive secretary Christiana Figueres told negotiators that progress depended on ambition - "ambition to support developing countries, ambition to mobilise finance and... ambition to decisively and tangibly reduce emissions according to what science demands".

By the end, several observers including Tove Maria Ryding of Greenpeace International concluded that ambition had been largely absent.

"It's absurd to watch governments sit and point fingers and fight like little kids while the scientists explain about the terrifying impacts of climate change," she said.

Full text: BBC

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Sharks Don't Cry - Stop Finning!

''"Sharks don't cry" is a very sad clip about a young tiger shark. The scenes were all shot secretly by hiding the camera. The film is part of the "Stop Finning" campaign from Sharkproject to call everyone up that butchering of sharks is a threat to our ecosystem.

Support Sharkproject. Get more information under http://www.sharkproject.org''