The hydrological model, published in the journal Nature, shows that in nearly 20% of regions that pump groundwater, rivers are already flowing too low to maintain healthy aquatic ecosystems.

This refers to this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1594-4

Abstract:

Groundwater is the world’s largest freshwater resource and is critically important for irrigation, and hence for global food security1,2,3. Already, unsustainable groundwater pumping exceeds recharge from precipitation and rivers4, leading to substantial drops in the levels of groundwater and losses of groundwater from its storage, especially in intensively irrigated regions5,6,7. When groundwater levels drop, discharges from groundwater to streams decline, reverse in direction or even stop completely, thereby decreasing streamflow, with potentially devastating effects on aquatic ecosystems. Here we link declines in the levels of groundwater that result from groundwater pumping to decreases in streamflow globally, and estimate where and when environmentally critical streamflows—which are required to maintain healthy ecosystems—will no longer be sustained. We estimate that, by 2050, environmental flow limits will be reached for approximately 42 to 79 per cent of the watersheds in which there is groundwater pumping worldwide, and that this will generally occur before substantial losses in groundwater storage are experienced. Only a small decline in groundwater level is needed to affect streamflow, making our estimates uncertain for streams near a transition to reversed groundwater discharge. However, for many areas, groundwater pumping rates are high and environmental flow limits are known to be severely exceeded. Compared to surface-water use, the effects of groundwater pumping are markedly delayed. Our results thus reveal the current and future environmental legacy of groundwater use.

I'm not sure if it's reasonable, but I'm starting to think that the amount of people that are currently inhabiting earth is just not sustainable. We are inhabiting many places that high risk for the people living there (fault lines, hurricane paths), we're exhausting resources and causing plants and animals to go extinct. And, according to this article, we're also exhausting groundwater reserves.

Meanwhile, projections show that probably another couple billion people will be added in the next three decades. There's strong resistance against any proposals to cut back emissions, especially if it means giving up some of the luxury we're used to (flights, meat, cars, large houses, etcetera).

I might have a bleak perspective of the current state of affairs, but I'm really not seeing any feasible short term solutions, that can actually get people on board. Naming possible solutions is easy, but getting everyone to agree seems downright impossible for the foreseeable future. And I fear that we won't change a thing before it's too late.

I agree. I don't think the earth can support more than about 4B or so people. Our aquifers are drying up and they can take centuries to refill. Or they compress and will never fill again (but maybe new ones will instead). We have no real chance of changing human behavior so it seems like we just need less humans. I'm not suggesting laws but you can remove tax breaks for kids after the second. Have all you want, you just don't get the breaks.

I think the earth is about to strike back and show us who is boss. Clean water, food monoculture, and antibiotics overuse are going to come home to roost and we'll quickly learn what a sustainable population is.

Desalination is used extensively by Israel.

why isnt it used more widely? because it's cheaper to just suck water out of the ground?

Pretty much.

It's expensive on a like for like basis but not in an absolute sense.

I think my water costs me about £16 per month for 3 of us (me, partner and step-son), if that doubled I wouldn't even notice it set against our other outgoings, We are just very used to very cheap clean water in developed countries (and also very used to wasting vast amounts of it).

Israel doesn't just desalinate a lot of their water but they are masters are conserving it's use (they are so good at drip-agriculture that their experts are showing other countries experts how to scale it up) of course drip-agriculture has it's own issues.

I think my water costs me about £16 per month for 3 of us (me, partner and step-son), if that doubled I wouldn't even notice it set against our other outgoings,

For the same kind of household, our yearly bill went from €115 to €415 in less than 10 years; I guarantee you start feeling it.

It doubled in 3 years, tripled in 6 years. I have no idea why, we are in a place where water is normally abundant (and there is zero irrigation).

It is not like we could reduce our consumption: we use only a tiny bit more than 7 m³ per month, for a house with garden. That means just 2.3 m³ per month per person. It is really not an American type of water consumption! Probably only a 3rd or even a quarter of it...

Could be a meter mixup

Another element of groundwater, and other natural mineral extraction (coff oil coff gas coff) is the legal doctrine that's applied, whether directly or through reference or gloss.

In much of the US and elsewhere, that's an old English common law notion called the Rule of Capture. As interpreted in a Texas Supreme Court ruling, Houston & Texas Central Railroad Co. v. East (1904), which held for the right of individuals to draw as much as they wished from any underground reservoir, "Because the existence, origin, movement and course of such waters, and the causes which govern and direct their movements, are so secret, occult and concealed that an attempt to administer any set of legal rules in respect to them would be involved in hopeless uncertainty"

https://www.twdb.texas.gov/publications/reports/numbered_rep...

That's still governing law in Texas, and is frequently referenced in the oil and gas industry, as a Web search on "rule of capture" will show.

One hundred fifteen years later, the science has moved on. It's well past time for that exceptionally poor example of jurisprudence to be overturned.

The Burns Slant Drilling Company wasn't too far off base!

Wonder how the Middle East deals with this when petroleum fields straddle borders...

One of the reasons behind Iraq invading Kuwait was the latter did slant drilling into the Iraqi oil fields, underground behind the border. Another reason was several billion dollars Iraq owed to Kuwait. What's interesting, a few days before Saddam invaded Kuwait, there were talks between the diplomats, and Kuwait was willing to forgo $800M in debt as a compensation for the slant drilling. Apparently, Saddam didn't want to hear of anything less than a billion. The rest is history...

The accusation of slant drilling was not proven in the slightest, and it's a misrepresentation to state it as a fact (Iraq itself is the only source which stood by that accusation).

I'm not saying it's impossible that it was true, but it is not a known fact like you represented it.

Oil and gas generally doesn't follow that even in Texas, for what it's worth. In most places, if the reservoir compartment you're producing from extends beyond the boundaries of your lease, you have to pay whoever owns the mineral rights of the rest of it proportionally. You still have the right to produce it in any way you want -- the other rights holder isn't suddenly in a joint partnership. Of course, these laws vary pretty wildly by state and country, but the norm is that you need to compensate someone if you're producing from something that extends onto their acreage.

Water is handled in the way you mentioned, though, which is pretty nuts.

It's interesting to see Rule of Capture survive being a common law most associated with some Lord's hunting (and ownership) rights of deer in a forest, river through their land etc. I think that bit of ancient thinking has been thoroughly superseded in the UK, and for many years. I'm not well up on that bit of law, but today there is a requirement for a permit to extract, which sets very specific limits on what you can extract. Not sure how long those permits last.

Netflix has a great series called "Explained", short 18 minute episodes about interesting topics. I just watched the one about water and it was a real eye opener. Who would have thought that cotton t-shirt required over a 1000 liters of water to produce. Even a can of Coke required some ridiculous amount of water to produce.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80216752

I'm always a bit dubious when claims are made that this or that "requires" a certain amount of water to do. What kind of water, and what happens to it afterwards? It doesn't just vanish.

Water is just moved from a useful (to humans) state to a less useful state. The bottom of which is seawater. Seawater is still useful, it just takes more energy to do it. There's an unlimited supply of less useful water.

All that to say that once we use the easy water, that cotton shirt is just going to cost a lot more.

It was a fantastic episode.

Someone there made the very sobering observation that the solution to the problem was to price water the way we price oil. That way we would redouble our efforts not to waste it.

But then that only really ends up punishing the people least responsible for the crisis in the first place.

After the water rationing I heard happening in South Africa’s capital, I took it upon myself to research commercial water from air extractors. A dehumidifier essentially.

There’s a company out in Arizona that had an article published in wired. Zero Mass Water. The article intrigued me. I lived close enough to the ocean, would it work?

I had a few panels installed on my roof. I can yield somewhere between 3-15 liters per day if the conditions are right. I can store 90 liters total. I use it as drinking water in my home. I no longer drink from municipal tap water as a result. Yes I shower with it, but I’m not really ingesting as much.

Point is I did the panels for the exact same reason this article is the mentioning water wars coming up. At some point we’ll have to be rationing water in cities and I don’t want that for myself or my family.

If it gets to that point laws may be passed to make it illegal to collect rainwater or harvest water from the air. Some states already have such laws.

Let's take Colorado as an example. It's because the water lands there and flows through into the Colorado River and on down to California. There's a treaty among all the states the Colorado River flows through governing water distribution (hint: California gets priority, and there's more water in the treaty than the river). So all that water is not just governed by local law but by interstate treaty.

And, frankly, such laws are necessary in many more places than have them. I until recently lived on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Plenty of water, right? Except if you drew down the aquifers too far, the sea would leach in and there goes your fresh water supply. They're currently fighting it out about how much population increase they can support and still have water, how much of the island needs to be left as or put into wetland and forest that efficiently captures water into the aquifers...

And on the mainland on both sides of Puget Sound, the water supply is snow melt. If you didn't get enough snow in the winter, you're looking at shortages in the summer. This is going to get worse over the next few decades most likely, alongside an increasing population.

Are you familiar with how much energy it takes to boil water?

Dehumidifying moisture from the air is effectively un-boiling water: you've got to remove the latent heat of vapourisation to convert a gas to a liquid. It's unbelievably energy consumptive, and there is no free lunch.

This sounds like a fantastic pairing with solar power! You can grab as much water as needed during the sunny times and store it for the dark times.

Offhand, how do you take care of other uses of water? It looks like flushing a toilet takes about 4L of water, so it seems like that would use up an entire bad day.