The Water Cycle

We need to view water coursing through and around our homes as a valuable resource worth conserving.

The water cycle moves vast quantities of water around the planet. It is the essential backdrop to all of life, especially human existence. However, we tend to notice only the more obvious signs of this ongoing exchange, such as the clouds and rain (or lack of!).

We can’t create new water. We can only use what already exists as the water cycle is a closed system and the total amount of water available remains constant. No matter how much we try to do things differently – build new reservoirs, recycle water, desalinate – we can’t expand this closed system. There is only one Earth.

According to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, water covers 70% of the planet’s surface, but 97% of this is salt water and only 3% is fresh water, with most of that locked up in Antarctica, the Arctic and glaciers. That only leaves around 0.5-1% of fresh water for human use.[i]

There are lots of competing uses for this fresh water as populations continue to expand (industry, agriculture, domestic). And the mistreatment of fresh water is leading to pollution and contamination, further eroding the quality of available supplies.

For some, this issue is a matter of life and death. Globally, one in five don’t have access to clean drinking water. Two in five don’t have adequate sanitation facilities. Hundreds of millions of farmers lack adequate water and/or the proper tools for irrigating their fields.[ii]

Those of us in the wealthier and luckier parts of the world have our own looming problems.

Many aquifers – those massive underground lakes, filled up in trickles over centuries or even millennia – are being pumped dry more quickly than they can be replenished.

Meanwhile, too many people with too many needs, using water too wastefully are pummeling natural systems that depend on a steady flow of clean water (eg. the River Murray ecosystem).

Climate change, man-made and natural, is exacerbating these problems. Rainfall patterns that have held more or less constant for generations are shifting, making some areas drier (SE Australia) and deluging others (Southern Qld/Nth NSW). Depending on where we live, we can now expect more droughts, more heavy downpours, or both.

There is widespread potential for conflict over valuable water resources, within and between borders. If we are to navigate the water challenge, we must start looking at water in a whole new way. We have use it more wisely every chance we get.

[i] World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Water: Facts and Trends, 2006, p1

[ii] As above, p4