Archives for April 2021

April 2021/ Civil Beat, Nick Grube: Before U.S. Rep. Kai Kahele returned to Washington last week, he joined professional surfer Laird Hamilton for a boat tour of the Hanalei River on Kauai.

Hamilton pointed out the invasive hau bush along the riverbanks and talked to the congressman about the heavy rains that erode the hillsides and submerge the roadways, occasionally cutting off the tiny North Shore community from the rest of the island.

Kahele also witnessed the disappearing shorelines caused by coastal erosion and rising sea levels triggered by climate change.

A freshman lawmaker who sits on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Kahele wanted to see firsthand how Hawaii’s bridges, roads and highways were holding up so that he could report back to his colleagues how much money the state might need should Congress pass President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan.

What Kahele saw, however, was not pretty.

In an interview with Civil Beat, Kahele described walking through a decades-old wastewater treatment plant that he thinks might be the “worst in the country” and visiting waterfronts where treated sewage is dumped onto the shoreline “right onto the rocks.”

“It’s not sexy,” Kahele said. “But if you saw what I saw you would know this is something we need to address.”

For the rest of the article see this link…

April 2021:  (Comment:  here is a piece that I co-authored about the international dimensions of the freshwater scarcity problem and implications for US national security)

Climate change is responsible for an unprecedented rise in tropical cyclones and other extreme-weather events, but related threats are also manifesting. According to a February 2021 study, rising temperatures may be responsible for a six-month summer in the Northern Hemisphere by 2100. A longer summer means greater water consumption. (Remember running through the sprinkler as a kid? Those days may be numbered.) Higher temperatures may also fuel longer, more frequent droughts and alter rainfall patterns that further degrade the environment and disrupt the water cycle.

Combined with a burgeoning global population and increased water demand for agricultural and urban purposes, the United States must brace for dwindling supplies of fresh water domestically and worldwide. In an unclassified memo released last year, the National Intelligence Council projected global water usage to increase by as much as 50 percent by 2050 as the world’s population grows by 1.5 billion. Already, there are 2 billion people with limited or unreliable access to sufficient supplies of clean water, according to the memo.

The Intelligence Community’s attention to global water security is understandable. As the single most critical resource to public health, food supplies, and energy production, the scarcity of fresh water portends escalating international competition for its availability. A September 2020 study by the World Resources Institute recorded 2015 as the first year with more than 20 interstate conflicts over water resources; within three years, that number more than doubled.

here is a link to the rest of the piece…

March 2021: University of Hawaii: The first imaging of substantial freshwater plumes west of Hawaiʻi Island may help water planners to optimize sustainable yields and aquifer storage calculations. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers demonstrated a new method to detect freshwater plumes between the seafloor and ocean surface in a study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters.

The research, supported by the Hawaiʻi EPSCoR ʻIke Wai project, is the first to demonstrate that surface-towed marine controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) imaging can be used to map oceanic freshwater plumes in high-resolution. It is an extension of the groundbreaking discovery of freshwater beneath the seafloor in 2020. Both are important findings in a world facing climate change, where freshwater is vital for preserving public health, agricultural yields, economic strategies, and ecosystem functions.

Here is the link to the original article…