A list of news and blog posts and other web items we stumbled upon in the past week…
- Tweet me a river (Living Circular) – details a project in which gauged rivers in the U.K. are given their own twitter account, providing updates about river conditions several times a day.
- Broken Landscape: Confronting India’s Water-Energy Choke (Environmental Change and Security Program) – highlights the current struggle between coal mine owners facing new government regulation, and those who live downstream where rivers have run dry taking away their livelihood, food, and drinking water.
- For schoolchildren, where’s the water? (CNN.com) – U.S. children may not always be able to easily access the drinking water available at their school.
- How China’s policy affects Asia’s great rivers (Gulf News) – book review includes M. Buckley’s Meltdown in Tibet, which discusses the implications of China controlling five major Asian rivers which originate in Tibet, and the effect it has on those who live downstream.
- A case of groundwater depletion in Balochistan, Pakistan: Enter into the void (Journal of Hydrology) – a December 2014 article about the lack of action taken over the depletion of groundwater in Kuchlagh.
- Lake Urmia: how Iran’s most famous lake is disappearing (The Guardian) – details the shrinkage of Iran’s most famous lake as it is now about 90% of what it was in the 1970s, and many worry that the lake may have reached a tipping point.
- Water for Energy: Inconsistent Assessment Standards and Inability to Judge Properly (Current Sustainable/ Renewable Energy Reports) – a report from January 2015 argues that there are many inconsistencies in evaluating the impact of energy production on water resources.
- The ‘100-year flood’ fallacy: Return periods misleading in communication of flood risk (Earth Magazine)- the term ‘100-year flood’ provides people with a false sense of security as averages and taken as absolutes, and in a changing climate how it is necessary to think of these events in new ways.
- Work is just beginning for California water policy (Sacramento Bee) – despite new legislation allocating money to help California handle the current drought, action needs to be taken to rethink and transform water infrastructure.
Contributed by Shafik Islam, Amanda Repella, Gregory Sixt, and Tahira Syed
