Water resources are set to become far more precious
Being short of water or having trouble getting what you have to where you want it concentrates the mind. In my case it’s not a big problem these days. When the strategically-placed large butts in the garden – please, do your own joke – to collect rainwater run dry, as they did during our recent hot summer, it only meant I had to carry the watering cans 20 yards further from the outside mains tap.
Yes, I could use a hose, but people with hoses use far more water than they need to. And the exercise is good for me. And I won’t mention those who use lawn sprinklers because thinking about it raises my blood pressure. Farm irrigation systems spraying hedges and roads have the same effect.
I realise that my annual attempts to keep our water use to a minimum, such as watering cans instead of a hose, a bucket of warm water rather than a running hose to wash the car, using grey water from the sink on the back border and not leaving the tap running while I clean my teeth can be undone in a day by one teenager having a shower.
Or far outdone, as was reported during the long hot spell this year when water-use restrictions were introduced in some areas, by the inefficiency of water companies losing millions of gallons daily in leaks. The most lobsterboiled teenager probably doesn’t use a million gallons in one shower, it just seems like it
But we have to start somewhere, even in Scotland where annual rainfall in some parts of the west can top four metres. Yes, it can.
Convert to centimetres and think about it, or go old-fashioned and think 150 inches and think of parts of Argyll you might have visited. Even in the “dry” east we expect 25 to 30 inches in an average year.
Think of the parts of the world where that would be wonderful news and the use that many countries where a flush toilet and clean, safe drinking water are seldom found could make of that amount of water; countries where an estimated two billion people struggle to get clean water at any time, never mind at the turn of a tap.
Obviously, just as us overeating as a matter of habit and trying to cut back won’t solve starvation in some troubled countries, my minuscule cutbacks in domestic water use solve little.
But I have to start somewhere and the point is we should all think harder about water use. Not just me, but farmers considering changes in production – which crops and animals need most water – and everyone who lets a tap run or doesn’t get a leak repaired or who runs a lawn sprinkler 24 hours a day.
I’m not alone in thinking this. Gordon Mcconachie of Savills said much the same recently in the SNFU’S house magazine
Farming Leader .He said that average rainfall in Scotland last year, high and low, east and west, north and south, was 149 centimetres. That was 55 per cent more than in England – although probably not in Wales where it actually does rain all the time – and 90 per cent of the UK’S water supply is based in Scotland.
His point? He went on: “In times of plenty here in Scotland we are profligate with our water resource… we must be better prepared in future as research tells us that water shortages will only become more acute.”
A UK government report and plan – I know, but they must get it right sometimes – suggests that more than half the UK population could be affected by water shortages by mid-century.
It’s obvious that most of that shortage will be in the thickly-populated south of England, but the most telling figures are that our water use has increased by 50 per cent in the past 25 years and that global demand could be 40 per cent greater than supply within 20 years.
Saving water, controlling water use, getting more water from where it is abundant to where it is needed, concerns us all now and will concern us increasingly in future.