Water – Security

Ambience: Stream
Schoenholtz: All aspects of the human endeavor on the planet ultimately rely on water.

Fill it up with regular, please. And I’ll take ten gallons of water. Is that a glimpse of our future? I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Schoenholtz: And as it becomes scarcer and of lower quality, pressures on it will mount and we can get into issues of water security in terms of political conflicts between countries, conflicts between states or within regions of countries, as the resource becomes more limited.

Stephen Schoenholtz is a professor in the Department of Forest resources and environmental conservation at Virginia Tech. He says that one of the solutions for saving water will be increasing its value in the marketplace.

Schoenholtz: In the United States, we pay very little for our water usage. So one outcome of increasing pressure on the water resource is clearly more expensive water. So that when you take a shower, when you use water resources in your home or in industry, the assumption that it’s free or very inexpensive disappears. We have to start paying for it as we pay for other resources.
So that instead of taking a 25 minute shower, you may be taking a two or three minute shower. Instead of using hundreds of gallons of water to run your washing machine or your dishwasher, we will develope technologies where we’ll use a fraction of that.
The comparison of water use between developed countries and third world countries is remarkable. To survive you need about 5 to 10 liters of water a day. In America we use four or five hundred liters of water per day per person, great excess of what’s needed to actually survive.

We’ll hear more on water in future programs. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Water - Security

In America we use four or five hundred liters of water per day per person, an amount far in excess of what's needed to actually survive.

Air Date:02/29/2016

Scientist:

Transcript:

Water - Security

Ambience: Stream
Schoenholtz: All aspects of the human endeavor on the planet ultimately rely on water.

Fill it up with regular, please. And I'll take ten gallons of water. Is that a glimpse of our future? I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Schoenholtz: And as it becomes scarcer and of lower quality, pressures on it will mount and we can get into issues of water security in terms of political conflicts between countries, conflicts between states or within regions of countries, as the resource becomes more limited.

Stephen Schoenholtz is a professor in the Department of Forest resources and environmental conservation at Virginia Tech. He says that one of the solutions for saving water will be increasing its value in the marketplace.

Schoenholtz: In the United States, we pay very little for our water usage. So one outcome of increasing pressure on the water resource is clearly more expensive water. So that when you take a shower, when you use water resources in your home or in industry, the assumption that it's free or very inexpensive disappears. We have to start paying for it as we pay for other resources.
So that instead of taking a 25 minute shower, you may be taking a two or three minute shower. Instead of using hundreds of gallons of water to run your washing machine or your dishwasher, we will develope technologies where we'll use a fraction of that.
The comparison of water use between developed countries and third world countries is remarkable. To survive you need about 5 to 10 liters of water a day. In America we use four or five hundred liters of water per day per person, great excess of what's needed to actually survive.

We'll hear more on water in future programs. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.