Pre-Incan Water Tech is Saving Peru
Forget space-age technology. Water starved Peru is turning to some old school - like, REALLY old school - methods to save their ailing water situation as climate change threatens to dry out the country.
Meanwhile the U.S. underestimates the risk of catastrophic flooding, and Germany beefs with Elon as his planned Tesla factory sucks up the local water supply.
This month:?
Bonus Link:?This ten minute video of water towers collapsing is pretty sweet.
First: Peruvians are using a 1,400-year-old technique to extend water availability into the long dry season
As you enter the Chillón River Valley, a narrow ravine of irrigated green crops sandwiched between giant towers of rock, you'll eventually come to a plateau at 3,500m (11,500ft.) where a little village of farmers calls home.
The Andes Mountains spawned some of the most complex civilizations in history - civilizations where people cultivated deep knowledge of water and the underground, deploying strategies that are still, astonishingly, used to this day.
This little village, and their ancestors that first grew crops in the area, are forced to be innovative with water. The seasonality of precipitation is a catalyst for hydrological innovations again and again.
Peru's Persistently Parched
Peru is among the world's most water-stressed countries. The capital Lima, home to a third of the country's population, receives?just 13mm (0.5 inches) of annual rainfall . It relies on three rivers born in the Andes that rise behind the city, soaring to 5,000m (16,400ft) in just 150 kilometres (93 miles).
Water scarcity in Peru is getting worse as a result of climate change . Within living memory, mountain glaciers have melted and the rainy season has shrunk to just a couple of months. Already Lima's water utility Sedapal can only supply customers 21 hours a day, a rate that Ivan Lucich, executive director of the national water regulator Sunass, says he expects to further decline in the coming years.
In fact, a 2019 World Bank report evaluating drought risk in Peru?concluded that the capital's current strategies to manage drought – dams, reservoirs, storage under the city – will be inadequate by as early as 2030 .
A radical water utility investment program
Several years ago, desperate for water security, the country's leaders did something radical: they passed a series of national laws requiring water utilities to invest a percentage of their customers' bills in "natural infrastructure."
These funds – called?Mechanismos de Retribucion por Servicios Ecosistemicos?(Mechanisms of Reward for Ecosystem Services) or MRSE – go to nature-based water interventions, such as restoring ancient human systems that work with nature, protecting high-altitude wetlands and forests, or introducing rotational grazing to protect grasslands. Before, it was considered a misuse of public funds if utilities invested in the watershed. Now it's required.
'Planting' Water - Amuna Matata
Today, modern Peruvians are redeploying their ancient knowledge and protecting natural ecosystems such as high-altitude wetlands to help the country adapt to climate change. It's one of the world's first efforts to integrate nature into water management on a national scale.
The people who live in the tiny mountainous villages are?comuneros: members of an agricultural collective. They use water canals called?amunas?– a Quechua word meaning "to retain" – to divert wet-season flows from mountain streams and route them to natural infiltration basins.
The strategy, invented by an ancient people called the Huari (WAR-i), is still practiced here and in a few other Andean villages. Because the water moves more slowly underground as it travels through gravel and soil, it emerges downslope from springs months later, when the?comuneros?collect it to water their crops. Because much of their irrigation soaks into the ground and eventually makes its way back to the rivers that supply Lima, repairing abandoned?amunas?scattered throughout the highlands could extend water into the dry season for city dwellers too.?
And the wet pillows shouldn't be forgotten
Another type of natural infrastructure that Peruvian utilities are investing in are bofedales, or cushion bogs. Unique to the Andes,?bofedales?are dominated by plants well adapted to tropical mountain conditions of "summer every day and winter every night",?thriving in intense sun, stiff winds, a short growing season, daily frost and seasonal snow . The low-growing, firm but spongey plants are pocked with small star-shaped flowers and interspersed with little pools of water.
Peatlands, including?bofedales, have a higher percentage of organic matter than other soils, making them unusually good at holding water.?Though peatlands cover just 3% of land area, they store 10% of all freshwater ?(not to mention 30% of the world's soil carbon).?In the steep landscape of the Andes,?bofedales?slow water runoff, preventing floods and landslides.?As the glaciers that once stored water melt,?bofedales?play an even more important role in holding water for supply in the dry season.
World - take note. If something's been around for 1,000+ years and still works, maybe we should consider using it in other places outside of Peru, too.
Next: the U.S. isn't ready for catastrophic flooding
In a new?study , North Carolina State University researchers used artificial intelligence to predict where flood damage is likely to happen in the continental United States. Their findings were eye-opening.
Researchers found a high probability of flood damage – including monetary damage, human injury and loss of life – for more than a million square miles of land across the United States across a 14-year period. That was more than 790,000 square miles greater than flood risk zones identified by FEMA’s maps.
“We’re seeing that there’s a lot of flood damage being reported outside of the 100-year floodplain,” said the study’s lead author Elyssa Collins, a doctoral candidate in the?NC?State Center for Geospatial Analytics. ?“There are a lot of places that are susceptible to flooding, and because they’re outside the floodplain, that means they do not have to abide by insurance, building code and land-use requirements that could help protect people and property.”
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FEMA methods have nothing on computers
It can cost FEMA as much as $11.8 billion to create national Flood Insurance Rate Maps, which show whether an area has at least a 1% chance of flooding in a year,?according to a 2020 report from the Association of State Floodplain Managers . Researchers say their method of using machine learning tools to estimate flood risk offers a way of rapidly updating flood maps as conditions change or more information becomes available.
“This is the first spatially complete map of flood damage probability for the United States; wall-to-wall information that can be used to learn more about flood risk in vulnerable, underrepresented communities,” said?Ross Meentemeyer , Goodnight Distinguished Professor of Geospatial Analytics at NC?State.
The computer was able to “learn” from actual reports of damage to predict areas of high flood damage likelihood for each pixel of mapped land. They created separate models for each watershed in the United States.
“Our models are not based in physics or the mechanics of how water flows; we’re using machine learning methods to create predictions,” Collins said. “We developed models that relate predictors – variables related to flood damage such as extreme precipitation, topography, the relation of your home to a river – to a data set of flood damage reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s very fast – our models for the U.S. watersheds ran on an average of five hours.”
The models were bad news bears
When they ran their computer models to determine flood damage risk, they found a high probability of flood damage for more than 1.01 million square miles across the United States, while the mapped area in FEMA’s 100-year flood plain is about 221,000 square miles.
Researchers said there are factors that could help explain why the differences were so large, including that their machine-learning-based model assessed damage from floods of any frequency, while FEMA only includes flooding that would occur from storms that have a 1% chance of happening in any given year.
“Potentially, FEMA is underestimating flood damage exposure,” Collins said.
One of the biggest drivers of flood damage risk was proximity to a stream, along with elevation and the average amount of extreme precipitation per year. The three Census regions with the highest probability were in the Southeast. Louisiana, Missouri, the District of Columbia, Florida and Mississippi had the highest risk of any U.S. state or district in the continental United States.
And the icing on the cake? The current models don't account for future climate changes - which could make flooding even more widespread.
Finally: Elon v. Germany - Tesla's War for Water
When Elon Musk was asked last year whether the factory?Tesla Inc. ?was constructing in Germany would deplete the area’s water supply, he laughed and called the notion “completely wrong.”
Six months later, water is one of the primary reasons the plant still isn’t producing vehicles.
While Musk in August?flippantly pointed ?to water “everywhere” around Berlin, the region?is suffering from falling groundwater levels and prolonged droughts due to climate change. That’s sparked a legal challenge that will go to court next week and an acknowledgment from local authorities that supply?will be insufficient?once Tesla ramps up the plant. The issue has the potential to further delay or even stop the 5 billion-euro ($5.7 billion) project in what could turn into a costly setback to the carmaker’s expansion.
“Tesla will increase the problem for sure,” said?Irina Engelhardt , who heads the hydrogeology department at Berlin’s Technical University. “There might not be enough water for everyone.”
Stage 1 is a go... but stage 2 might fail to launch
“The current water supply is sufficient for the first stage of the factory,”?Brandenburg Economy Minister Joerg Steinbach?said in an interview. Once Tesla expands the site, “we’ll need more.”
Brandenburg’s environment office was sued last year, saying it failed to take into account the impact of climate change when approving a 30-year permit to pump more groundwater for Tesla’s factory. Authorities say the issue is manageable and that they’re already looking for additional supply. A decision in favor of the environmentalists would likely delay the plant’s opening and could derail it altogether.?A first court hearing is scheduled for March 4.
Tesla’s factory would roughly double the amount of water consumed in the Gruenheide area, according to?Axel Bronstert , a hydrology professor at the University of Potsdam. He said it’s “naive” to think reserves would suffice for both the factory and residents, and called the groundwater situation in Brandenburg “serious.”
But Tesla is one of the better ones
Tesla flagged in its?impact report ?last year that water is becoming increasingly scarce due to climate change. The company said it withdraws less water per vehicle produced than the majority of established carmakers, and that it’s taking steps at the German plant to further reduce usage.
As per a contract with local authorities, the Gruenheide site would get 1.4 million cubic meters of water annually —?enough for a city of around 40,000 people. Steinbach said that while he’s taking the environmental concerns very seriously, the large majority of the local population is in favor of the factory. Brandenburg authorities are backing efforts to drill for more water in the area and supply?could also be sourced from further away if necessary, he said.
And exactly what do the locals have to say?
Manuela Hoyer, who lives just a few miles from the factory, says Tesla is getting preferential treatment from local politicians even though it would make an already serious environmental issue worse.
“We’ve been told for years that we shouldn’t water our lawns,” Hoyer, who is active in a citizen’s initiative monitoring the project, said in an interview. “Then the world’s richest man comes along and gets everything he wants.”
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And that's a wrap for At Water's Edge no.4!
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-Adam
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