Singapore's H2O Lessons For California
Peter Gleick is perhaps California's leading water conservation expert. The Pacific Institute president, Gleick is also a MacArthur "genius grant" winner and the author of, Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water.Among the issues he's been blogging about of late: Singapore's success in reducing water consumption. Sound esoteric? Gleick points to the lessons that California can take from the Asian city/state where residents use only 40 gallons of water daily per capita, as opposed to 130 gallons in the Golden State. Singapore also has cut back on the water it purchases from neighboring rival, Malaysia, a savvy political move, Gleick implies.Gleick writes:
"What are the lessons for other parts of the world, including California? Price water properly, collect wastewater and treat it for reuse, move more aggressively to conservation and efficiency, and consider new supply options, such as desalination when it can be done economically and environmentally acceptable manner. Instead, we're moving toward new costly and damaging surface storage reservoirs, cutting back on efficiency programs, failing to learn lessons that could help grow more food with less water, ignoring leaks and waste in old infrastructure, and continuing to fail to meter and price water properly."
Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user mapper-montag. It was used under Creative Commons license.
