AN ADAPTATION STRATEGY FOR CLIMATE-CHANGE RELATED WATER SCARCITY
Water shortages will not be rare under current Climate Change. Steadily rising average temperature will make every living being consume more water. It also elevates the rate of evaporation from the lakes and surface soil.
Accelerated denudation of forest cover in recent decades has reduced the runoff infiltration and thus the rate of groundwater recharging.
Mass scale water pollution by industrial,
mining, agricultural and urban activities leaves us with less and less
consumable water.
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| Dense urbanization allows no infiltration of rain La Paz, Bolivia |
Accelerated denudation of forest cover in recent decades has reduced the runoff infiltration and thus the rate of groundwater recharging.
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| Mining waste contaminate air and water Llallagua, Bolivia |
Why do we talk about nurturing water? We can survive a long period without eating, but not without water. Water comprises of over half the human body mass. Really, it is mother water -‘yaku mama’ (Cachiguango and Ponton, 2010) that nurtures us. So, in droughts, why don’t we try to nurture her, as a matter of mutual respect?
Our ancestors, for their water supply, depended on the natural
environment, much more than we do today, and thus, revered and respected the
nature more. Without waiting for
external help, they integrated water nurturing activities to their community living.
To execute those activities, they employed
mainly local materials, and their individual and collective, mental and
physical resources. Current climate crisis will affect everybody, leaving
nobody to come to our rescue, so we’ll have to deal with it on our own.
Thus we propose ancient water nurturing practices as the best tool to
prepare for coming water shortages. Not that
each such practice worked every time or everywhere; we simply have inherited those
that suit each region the best. They
include techniques for forecasting the climate, procuring water in droughts,
rainwater harvesting, tapping into groundwater, conserving and consuming water,
and dealing with excess rainwater.
How did our ancestors
predict the weather?
Scientists today have a difficult time in accurately forecasting weather,
for the lack of precise historic and continuous climate data. However, some
village elders have the ability to fairly correctly predict when the rain would
fall in their locality and how much. Such abilities they have developed by observing
carefully the environment around them: celestial bodies, meteorological events,
animals and plants, on particular dates. They would analyze both conflicting and
consistent indicators based on past experiences before making tentative
predictions, but would confirm them only after observing similar events on
other corresponding dates.
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| Sun’s halo indicates freezing days (Courtesy: Marco Martinez, Ecuador) |
Such predictions, whether based on changing rock colors in Walawe river
(Uragoda 2000) o on St. John’s day meteorological events around Lake
Titicaca-Perú (Chuyma Aru 2007), always depend on past weather patterns.
Changing climate may make them also
error-prone. Thus, we should first learn
why and how such indicators and the local climate were related, and create a
new knowledge-base connecting current weather patterns to those indicators.
What options do we have if
the rains get delayed?
Our ancestors used rituals to communicate with the nature, to show appreciation,
request help or make an objection. During a ritual pleading for rain, they
would use: loud appeals by children (Cachiguango and Ponton 2010) or by animals
(especially frogs); symbolic objects (feathers representing wind, turquoise –
water, etc.); and sacrifices o payments.
Rain-seeking frog marriages are held in India even today, while in
Indonesia volunteer rattan cane fighters bear the pain for rain. Such acts would bring results only when conducted
in good faith, with the aim of bringing the society in harmony with the nature,
not when enacted in isolation begging for a particular benefit.
Ancient Andean Pacific coast dwellers captured water from thick humid
fog during the dry season using dense tree barriers on top of coastal ridges. A few rural communities still maintain those
water capture and storage systems, but in their absence, costly modern mesh
structures are needed to reestablish vegetation in that arid environment. Mimicking ancient salt ponds, we can capture
pure water from a contaminated pool, albeit in small quantities, condensing its
vapor in a closed environment, and that may suffice to survive an emergency. Ancient societies manipulated clouds to convert
hail into rain: Europeans fired cannons into the clouds; in Andean high plains everybody
sends up black smoke, even today. Now,
some people try to force rain through cloud-seeding, using rockets or
airplanes, but its doubtful cost-effectiveness and grave socio-environmental
consequences (Morrison 2009) holds back its widespread use.
Rainwater and runoff harvesting
Efficiently capturing and storing rainwater requires no sophisticated
technologies, but only advanced planning.
Ancient cities collected rainwater in individual homes (Evanari et al.
1982) and in public plazas to avoid costly and attack-prone external water
supply systems. Modern city dwellers too can use rainwater to reduce municipal
water consumption: at least for garden irrigation and washing. Some cities (e.g. Portland-Oregon) offer
incentives to citizens for reducing the runoff entering city sewage systems and
gain a lot through reduced treatment costs.
The surface runoff can be intercepted by contour canals and directed
towards storage reservoirs. Yet, storing
runoff in the field soil itself, as practiced by Hopi and Zuni agriculturists
in southwestern US, using long contour lines of rocks or branches, reduces the erosion
as well. In steeper slopes, the
soil-water traps are strengthened by terracing, trenching o check damming.
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| Bhu wewa sluice intake – Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka |
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| Bhu wewa sluice well – Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka |
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| Ancient cascading tanks – Mau Ara, Walawe river, Sri Lanka |
Yet, in rural areas, they opted for a simpler mechanism, by building many cascading small reservoirs across pretty much every branch river.
Subterranean water
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| Filtration gallery cleaning well - Nazca |
Past Ecuadoreans in Santa Elena peninsula also captured rainwater in
thousands of small tanks at the head of micro catchments. However, instead of trying to maintain surface
storage in this semiarid zone, they located the tanks above a porous rock
formation with the intention of recharging the springs downstream to survive
the long dry spells. Where spring flow
is not sufficient, our forefathers tunneled deep into the mountains, bringing
large volumes of water from aquifers to the surface under gravity, like ancient
qanats of Middle East (Goldsmith and Hildyard 1984) and filtration galleries of
Nazca-Peru. The famous Nazca lines seem to follow numerous geological faults
and hence indicate possible groundwater sources in that extremely arid location
(Proulx 2008?).
The Inca engineers of Cuzco-Peru had built bench-terrace walls between impermeable
rocky ridges, delineating surface-dry streams, to trap behind them shallow
groundwater and thus filtered out steady flows for bathing or irrigation (Fairley
2003). Today, dry NE Brazil uses submerged curtain walls across intermittent
streams, economically trapping and storing water underground (UNEP 1997). To
extract this water and help maintain the system properly, a filtration gallery
can be incorporated just upstream of its curtain wall.
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| Sunken gardens – Trujillo, Peru |
Instead of pumping out groundwater for irrigation, some ancient farmers opted
to lower the cultivation floor! Those
sunken-gardens along the arid Peruvian coast have been continuously cultivated (Schjellerup 2009), at least since the Chimu kingdom
(1300 AD), when they flourished because of constant irrigation of the land
upslope.
Making the best use of
captured water
First, reduce the consumption and eliminate water losses throughout the
supplying system. Low volume WCs,
urinals for men and dry-toilets allow reducing water consumption without
sacrificing modern-day comforts. Tubes
and surface-linings can cut water losses during the conduction and storage, but
preventing distribution losses, especially in irrigation, requires analyzing
all the variables involved: types of seeds, cultivation time, soil, climate and
irrigation mechanism. In SE Turkey, cultivating
saffron instead of cotton, 90% of the water requirement was cut down while keeping
the incomes intact (Drynet 2008?). Mulching,
wind breakers and organic enrichment of soil, etc., will help reduce the loss
of soil humidity and thus the need for frequent irrigation.
Second, do not contaminate water and recycle it. In urban homes, reusing
grey water reduces the costs to both the consumer and the municipality. In semi-urban and rural areas, recycling septic
tank water can become cheaper in the long run.
In farm houses, stable-wash discharge can produce biogas, which accelerates
the composting process of its solids component and facilitates recycling the
liquid.
Coping with too much rain
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| Aerial view: Momposina canals and raised fields (Courtesy: Banco de la Republica, Colombia) |
As we try to capture every drop of water to beat a drought, a flashflood
could destroy it all. Our reliance on
land-access makes us vulnerable to floods, especially in low-lying areas, where
our forefathers, in contrast, had developed ‘aquatic civilizations’ to live in
harmony with water. Huge floodplains of
Colombia (Momposina), Ecuador (Lower Guayas) and Bolivia (Mojos) were heavily
populated and more prosperous many centuries ago compared to now (Denevan 2001). They dug wide canals raising the cultivable
and livable land in-between.
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| Kalinga Ela – Polonnaruwa: An ancient Mahaweli river flood control and navigation attempt? |
The canals diverted
high river flows to low-lying swamps reducing the risk of flooding, and permitted
unhindered canoe travel. This also facilitated
capturing nutrient-rich sediments for raised field cultivation and fish growth
in the swamps.
Modern ‘flood protection’ schemes, in contrast, uproot entire villages, destroy
the aquatic life, bring about health hazards, deprive nutrients to the fields,
and when their structures can´t cope with high flows, cause worse floods on
‘protected’ properties. Most such projects fail, because the designers, lacking
reliable long-term data on rainfall, river flow and sediment transport, invent
numbers to support politicians’ promises.
Lack of proper catchment monitoring and maintenance of control structures
worsen the situation. Many such failures have shown that modern
‘nature-conquering’ premise is completely false.
Rain-related soil erosion can be minimized through contour terracing,
trenching, check- damming and reforestation. To stabilize earth slides, prepare flexible
groundwater drainage paths through the moving mass, plant deep-rooting and
rapid-growing trees, and then, take measures to reduce surface erosion. If water-logging could threaten the
cultivating fields, prioritize raising the plant beds, instead of sinking them
to capture more humidity in droughts, as flooding occurs too rapidly and causes
more damage.
Adapting to the changing
climate
The changing climate challenges us to be self-sufficient, inquisitive
and practical field researchers. Leave
aside your academic titles, but previous field training would come real handy
in this endeavor. Dealing with water
scarcity (or excess of it) is the most important task in these demanding times. When you confront a problem,
keep your mind open to whatever crazy solution that props up (we hope this
paper helps germinate more of those) and don´t discard it till you test it in
the field. Such an attitude would be the best homage we can offer to the finest
field engineers ever –our forefathers.
Kashyapa A. S. Yapa
Riobamba, Ecuador.
kyapa@yahoo.com
http://ky59.blogspot.com
June 2013.
References:
1.
Cachiguango,
Luis Enrique “Katsa” and Julián Pontón (2010) “Yaku-Mama: La crianza del agua–
la música ritual del Hatun Puncha Inti Raymi en Kotama, Otavalo” Cultural
Ministry of Ecuador, june.
2.
CHUYMA
ARU (2007) “Señas y secretos de crianza de la vida” Asociación Chuyma de Apoyo
Rural, Puno, Perú.
3. Denevan, William M. (2001) "Cultivated landscapes of the native Amazonia and the Andes", Oxford Univ. Press, NY.
3. Denevan, William M. (2001) "Cultivated landscapes of the native Amazonia and the Andes", Oxford Univ. Press, NY.
4. Drynet (2008?) “Using a Flower to Combat
Desertification”, http://www.dry-net.org/uploaded_files/Case2_EN.pdf
5. Evanari, Michael, Leslie Shanan and Naphtali Tadmor
(1982) “The Negev: the challenge of a desert” 2nd ed., Harvard U Press,
Cambridge.
6. Fairley Jr., Jerry P. (2003) “Geologic water storage
in pre-Columbian Peru”, Latin American Antiquity 14(2): 193-206.
7. Goldsmith, Edward and Nicholas Hildyard (1984) “The
qanats of Iran”, in ‘The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams: Volume
1. Overview’ Wadebridge Ecological Centre, UK. http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/books/the-social-and-environmental-effects-of-large-dams/
8. Morrison, Anthony E. et al (2009) “On the analysis of
a cloud seeding dataset over Tasmania”, Journal of Applied Meteorology and
Climatology, 48: 1267–1280.
10. Schjellerup, Inge R. (2009) “Sunken fields in the
desert of Peru” The Egyptian journal of environmental change, vol 1:1, pp
25-33, Oct. http://www.envegypt.com/EJEC/uploads/30.pdf
11. Uragoda, C. G. (2000) “Traditions of Sri Lanka”,
Vishva Lekha, Ratmalana, Sri Lanka.
12.
UNEP -United
Nations Environmental Program (1997) “Source Book of Alternative Technologies
for Freshwater Augmentation in Latin America and the Caribbean”, International
Environmental Technology Center, Osaka, Japan. http://www.unep.or.jp/ietc/Publications/techpublications/TechPub-8c/
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