ENSC 201 was a course taught by Dr. Leech and it was focused on integrated environmental policies. We focused a lot on current environmental issues and tried ti apply these issues into research papers to address to scientists or general public. We also analyzed various scientific articles as a class to gain skills in analyzing and breaking down research papers. The document below is an article discussion that I had written that broke down the main concepts and points on freshwater scarcity.
Freshwater Scarcity Article Discussion
This study done by Mekonnen and Hoekstra, the problem that is being addressed is to determine whether or not the recent estimates on water scarcity were accurate. This is a very important and severe problem because water is used globally and is essential to life here on earth. It was hypothesized that even though annual assessments of water scarcity are recorded, it hides the variability and ranges within the years which underestimate the true extent of water scarcity. It is said that ~ 785 million people globally have no access to freshwater sources, but the authors of this article state that the number is closer to 4 billion people. The overall goal of this article is to meet freshwater demands as well as keeping nearby ecosystems safe and protected as well as show how water scarcity is truly affecting environments globally.
In this study, the authors asses global water scarcity on a monthly basis rather than annually to help support their hypothesis. For this to be done, Mekonnen and Hoekstra assessed blue water scarcity on a grid cell monthly at a 30 x 30 arc min. These measurements were done upon four levels: low, moderate, significant and severe. It is stated that out of the 4 billion people, a majority of them suffer from severe water scarcity during a portion of the year which supports the hypothesis that it is worse than what was suggested in other studies. (Mekonnen et al. 2016). Blue water scarcity (WS) is classified as low if the water footprint does not exceed the water availability (1.0). This can be shown in figure 1 where major parts of the world are well above 1.0 both monthly and yearly. It makes sense that the poles were below 1.0 because there is a lot of ice as well as less inhabitants. Mekonnen and Hoekstra made sure to record all areas globally whether they were more severe in water scarcity or if they were only moderately facing water scarcity. One thing that was kept in mind while recording these measurements was water flow such as how water flowing upstream is affecting water flowing downstream to help keep these measurements accurate and precise.
Some major findings in the article is that it is very difficult to meet freshwater demands let alone maintain them. This is because freshwater doesn’t supply a specific group or population, it affects the earth as a whole whether it being consumption for organisms, or a habitat for aquatic creatures. Although it is very difficult to maintain freshwater levels and demands, humans as a whole can help out by preserving and saving freshwater and freshwater sources rather than not caring and being wasteful. That’s the main problem to people in our community is that they think we have so much water because it is easily supplied, but they don’t see freshwater sources and supply globally. One major finding and possible conclusion is that the government needs to become more involved by informing citizens as well as creating the water footprint benchmarks. If people get more informed about these reoccurring issues, then people globally can help make a significant change. Also, by increasing yields, we can help reduce nonreproductive evaporation. This can be done by allowing 80% of the runoff for the surrounding environment and giving humans only 20% of the runoff (Mekonnen et al. 2016).