Apologies for the total lack of posts in the last month. I will soon be finally posting the final part of my commentary on the Californian drought, but in the meantime I'd like to draw attention to this news story, based on the research presented in this article.
This new research suggests that human water use is up to 20% bigger than we previously thought. It is an interesting study, as most in this field have been based on national statistics and global scales models, whereas this research actually used real data from 100 river basins around the world. The reason for this increase is suggested to be human water management practices leading to greater evapotranspiration of water. Irrigation increases evapotranspiration, dams and reservoirs have the same effect as a result of increasing the surface area of water. Dams and reservoirs also raise groundwater levels, which means water is available to more plants compared to an unmanaged state, leading to more evapotranspiration.
Clearly, there is still a large lack of specific knowledge on this subject, but this synthesis of data is clearly an important piece of work. Understanding the size of the fluxes of water within the hydrological system are key for planning sustainable water usage.
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