Drought, heat and poor management make getting fresh water an increasingly difficult task

2024-03-22 08:48:02

As the planet warms due to man-made climate change, many are finding it increasingly difficult to get fresh water for drinking, cooking and cleaning.

This is because global warming causes erratic rainfall patterns, extreme heat and periods of drought, adding to decades of water mismanagement and extractive policies around the world. The United Nations estimates that around 2.2 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water.

On World Water Day, Associated Press journalists around the world interviewed some of the people struggling to get clean water.

Justina Flores, a 50-year-old grandmother, lives in a suburb in the hills of Lima, Peru, without running water. With some of the water she receives from the government, she hand-washes the clothes of her family of six and then reuses it to bathe the dog or throws it on the floor to prevent dust from rising and entering the house. .

Peru’s government supplies drinking water to 1.5 million of its poorest people, like Flores, who live in the hills. Huge tanker trucks full of water climb the steep roads and the scarcity of this resource often causes conflicts between neighbors.

Flores strives to use as little water as possible in all its daily activities. He has an old washing machine, but claims that by hand he can save regarding 45 liters (12 gallons) per wash.

The family receives regarding 3,000 liters (790 gallons) for washing, cooking and cleaning each week, while in San Isidro, the wealthiest area of ​​the capital, a family of the same size uses an average of 11,700 liters (3,090 gallons) of running water per week, according to official data.

Flores has worked in the homes of wealthy families since she was a child, so she has seen that disparity firsthand.

“In those houses you can bathe as many times as you want. “Here, at most, twice a week,” she said, looking out the window at the buildings covering the slopes.

In the vast Indonesian archipelago, access to drinking water is doubtful, also in its most developed city, Jakarta, where more than 10 million people live.

Since she was a child, Devi Putri Eka Sari, a 37-year-old mother of three, has had to buy water from vendors lining the narrow paved streets of her working-class neighborhood, even following the government installed pipes and pumps to extract water from the subsoil.

The government supply is unreliable, he said: sometimes when he turns on the tap, nothing more than a few drops fall. But even if it flowed regularly, he would not dare drink it.

“It’s not healthy. “It’s full of bacteria that make you sick,” she noted. “It smells like a swimming pool, like chemicals.”

Your fear of bacteria is not unfounded. Seven in 10 Indonesian households consume drinking water contaminated with E. coli, according to the World Health Organization.

Instead, Sari, like millions of other Indonesians across the country, buys water in large refillable containers or single-use plastic bottles. They are easy to find, but they generate large amounts of garbage in city waterways, already cluttered with plastic.

“This is what I’ve done my whole life,” he said. “It’s the option we have.”

Mimoun Nadori bends down to dip his hand in the river and test the water next to the groves where his family has long grown fruits and vegetables on their farms in northern Morocco.

He grimaces. It’s salty. But it wasn’t like that before.

“Everything was green,” he remembers. “We drank from the river and washed with the river. We made life with it.”

But decreasing rainfall and increased damming and extraction upstream mean that the Moulouya River channel has less water, threatening the livelihoods of farmers like Nadori. Where the river once flowed from the mountains into the Mediterranean, it is now stagnant, allowing sea water to move inland and turn the water, once a source of life, into a deadly poison.

Nadori began importing water for his poultry farm following his cows, which used to drink from the river, died. He did not know that the water was brackish, nor that the animals drank it, until they ended up dead.

Overexploitation of the river has also increased pressure on groundwater reserves as farmers like Nadori — as well as those across the nearby Algerian border — dig more wells to make up for the loss of the old supply.

“We are not going to lie and say that the reason is only humans or drought, it is both,” he noted. “We don’t know how to use water and we waste a lot of it.”

There was a time when the water in Fred and Robin Imfeld’s pool sparkled on hot summer days and their gardens were filled with plants.

But two years ago, the well that supplied his home in Corning, a rural area of ​​California, went dry for the first time in 40 years. Now the pool is empty and its trees are stained with rust.

Across California, domestic wells have dried up at record levels in recent years due to drought and over-drawing, causing groundwater levels to decline. The couple wants to drill a new, deeper well, but the cost is very high, regarding $25,000.

They now depend on state-funded water supplies. Twice a month, they refill a 2,500-gallon (9,463-liter) tank outside their garage to shower and wash dishes and clothes. Additionally, every two weeks they receive 113 liters (30 gallons) of potable water for cooking and drinking.

When they need more, Fred carries water as he did for seven months when the well dried up, before he had the tank. He loads his truck with containers, drives nearly five kilometers (three miles) to a friend’s house and fills them with water.

“We are emotionally exhausted from the past, trying to deal with (the water) and worried regarding what is coming and where we are going to go from here,” Fred said.

MAKUENI COUNTY, KENYA

Joyce Mule used to walk for regarding two hours to find water. In their rocky mountain town in Makueni County, in Kenya’s dry southeast, it is a rare commodity. There is little piped water and few reliable alternatives.

One of the techniques he used to obtain it was through holes in the sandy river beds. To do this, people dug in the sand and the water retained in the pore spaces seeped into the hole. The method is still popular in the southeast of the country.

But in 2012, she and her neighbors decided to address the problem by adopting a stone harvesting system, a method of collecting rainwater in permeable outcrops through giant natural rocks that rise hundreds of meters (feet) above the ground. Mule collects water there regarding five times a day and takes regarding half an hour to carry it home.

The technology is simple: villagers build a concrete wall around the rock to trap rainwater. They place large stones to filter it and a pipe to lower it to the storage tanks. The water collected in the rock reaches the tank through the pipe and then to a collection point where residents draw it from taps.

She is happy because it is close, it is always available and it is clean water. As a result, their trees produce more fruit and their cows give more milk.

“Before we thought that these stones were worthless, but now we see the benefits,” he said.

Ramkrishan Malawat, 52, remembers when groundwater was just 21 meters (70 feet) below the surface and the mighty river that ran 10 km (6 miles) from his farm in Bawal, near New Delhi, provided abundant water.

But now the river has dried up and the water is 76 meters (250 feet) deep. “We are forced to dig deeper with each passing year,” he said. Malawat has a borehole from which he draws water for his crops: mustard, maize and various millets.

The deeper you go, the dirtier the water is, he said, as “the level of contamination from fluoride and other chemicals increases.”

India is the world’s largest extractor of groundwater, pumping more water than the United States and China combined, according to the UN.

Extraction for agriculture, construction and other needs, together with climate changes such as irregular rainfall and extreme heat, cause the level of underground reserves to drop drastically throughout the country.

“There is so much construction here that when it rains the water runs away,” instead of seeping in and replenishing reservoirs, Malawat said. Bawal is better known for its automotive industry than for agriculture.

“Sometimes I worry that in 10 or 15 years, there will be no good water available to grow crops in my town,” he said.

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Associated Press journalists Carlos Mureithi in Makueni, Kenya; Sibi Arasu in Bengaluru, India; Manish Swarup in Bawal, India; Dorany Pineda in Los Angeles; Sam Metz and Oussama Alaoui in Ras El Ma, Morocco; Victoria Milko in Jakarta, Indonesia; Franklin Briceño in Lima, Peru, and Natalia Gutierrez in New York contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage is supported by several private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for the content.

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