How can Greece solve its water crisis?
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network
Greece is currently ranked 26th for water stress in the world and its climate change predictions are bleak: around 30 percent of Greece could become desert over the next few decades. While there are solutions that could help mitigate the worst future water shortages, it is a challenge that everyone in Greece is going to have to help overcome. Building efficient desalination plants on islands such as Nisyros will likely provide residents and tourists with a refreshing glass of clean water, but everyone will need to be more mindful of what it took to get that water into the glass—the more we appreciate water, the less we will waste, and the more likely we are to secure our water future.
But it’s not just the islands that are facing a dismal water future: mainland Greece has significant problems too. Athens is one of the cities that climate change could severely impact within 30 years and it is already experiencing some degree of water shortage. Water demand in the greater Athens region is growing at an excessive and unsustainable rate—around six percent a year. This is driven by a growing urban population and an expansion beyond apartment blocks to suburban homes with thirsty gardens. Unless Greece takes urgent measures to cut water use, in a few years supply will simply not meet demand.
SOURCE AND FULL ARTICLE ON NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Taxonomy
- Climate Change Resilience
- Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM)
4 Comments
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One of the biggest mistakes that all societies make that treat their wastewater is to allow "all" of it to flow to the oceans (via, streams, rivers, etc) without looking for groundwater "recharge" for the future. If an island is serious that would look for alternate ways to use their treated effluent to store in the ground, use bio-swails for reabsorption and percolation, and constructed wetlands diverting treated effluent back into the ground rather than contribute to even greater ocean rise. This requires long term rethinking of how to preserve water even treated wastewater.
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If I were a Greek and read that ‘Greece is currently ranked 26th for water stress in the world and its climate change predictions are bleak: around 30 percent of Greece could become desert over the next few decades’, I’d want more than ‘sticking plaster’ solutions, the low hanging fruit of recycling. The solution is probably an amalgam of efforts, however, considered simply in a feed and bleed analogy, if what is bled-out exceeds what is fed-in, all the recycling in the world will not resolve the problem of not having enough water for socio-economic stability and growth. https://www.composium-group.com/
Solutions needs to be commensurate in scale with the size of the problem. Currently, there is only one solution on the table, i.e. low cost, sustainable desalination.
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Besides all of us monitoring our water usage and trying not to lose water unnecessarily, infrastructure problems like leaking water service pipes should also be solved. Treated water is lost before it even reaches the door of the building. In Tokyo, Seoul and Taipei they have overcome this problem by installing stainless steel corrugated pipes. Find out more: https://www.worldstainless.org/Files/issf/non-image-files/PDF/ISSF_A_workable_solution.pdf
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The operative statement is from "Water demand to ...gardens." So please don't blame 'climate change'. The solutions are less concentrated population, less suburbanification, desalinated or recycled water and conservation.