Recently former DOJ officials involved in the program, among others, have called for an end to the effort or a significant change in its focus. Testifying on the matter before Congress, Attorney General Merrick Garland promised that the Justice Department would be carrying out a review of the program.  Given this context, “if there had […]

As we were closing this issue, I came across a video on Twitter of a highway just outside Vancouver, submerged in water. It wasn’t the only one. The densely populated urban heart of British Columbia was cut off from the rest of Canada by flooding and mudslides after an atmospheric river barreled through. The country’s […]

But that source is vulnerable—not only to drought but to politics. “In the past, there were multiple times when the relationship between the two countries [Malaysia and Singapore] had some friction, with water being a matter of dispute,” says Stuti Rawat, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Asian and Policy Studies at the Education […]

The private sector is not necessarily waiting for the city to remedy its water woes. The wine industry, for example, was hit exceptionally hard by the drought. Since then, many vineyards have established state-of-the-art water management systems designed around the concept of self-sufficiency. Tactics include reusing treated wastewater, collecting rainwater, and using elaborate irrigation systems […]

But Pakistan isn’t facing a water problem purely because of climate change. Water conservationists say a mix of resource mismanagement, groundwater depletion, and inadequate water storage have pushed the system to a precarious point. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city, which has a daily water shortfall of hundreds of […]

INFILTRATION The city has built public spaces such as the Parque Bicentenario, which boasts volcanic soil. Its porous ground directs rainfall to the aquifer, heading off flooding, reducing subsidence, preventing damage to infrastructure, and replenishing the drinking water supply. Source: MIT Technology Review

In many ways, it’s hard to imagine our world of nearly 8 billion people and $85 trillion in annual goods and services without this water engineering. Cairo, Phoenix, and other large desert cities could never have grown to their present sizes. California’s sunny Central Valley would not have become such an abundant producer of vegetables, […]

In the past decade, however, these wells have started to run dry. Travel beyond the homesteads and family-run farms you’ll see why—thousands of acres of neatly ordered trees bearing pecans and pistachios, vast fields of alfalfa and corn, huge dairy herds, and rows of greenhouses growing tomatoes cover the once-barren desert. This enormous carpet of […]

There is a lot of shouting about climate change, especially in North America and Europe. This makes it easy for the rest of the world to fall into a kind of silence—for Westerners to assume that they have nothing to add and should let the so-called “experts” speak. But we allneed to be talking about […]

Molly shot me an acid look. “You know what I think about that kind of laundering.”  I did; everyone did. Elyse Flayme’s best friend Meritxell was always coming up with ways in which they could keep using magic and delay Arrenia’s destruction, and Elyse was always saying, We have to choose what matters to us, […]