Water utilities, like electricity companies, are trying to meet the challenge by adopting “smart” technology that measures, monitors and manages every last drop flowing through their systems. That’s not always easy, considering the water infrastructure in many parts of Europe, the US and elsewhere are aging and prone to failure … even moreso than power grids.

Adding a layer of “smart” onto even outdated water systems, though, can help bring service into the 21st century. In India, for example, a residential water meter upgrade in Delhi is aimed at — for the first time — getting actual measurements, rather than estimates, for how much water people are using. In a city where more than half of water customers have either a defective meter or no meter at all, those kinds of measurements could help prevent a tremendous amount of water waste.

In water-stressed Australia, an updated metering system in the remote town of Kalgoorlie is designed to not only identify water leaks in a place where every drop counts, but to send automatic alerts to the utility so those can be repaired as quickly as possible. Other cities in the country are pursuing similar upgrades, funded through the Australian government’s National Water Security Plan for Cities and Towns program.

Another advanced metering system being deployed in parts of the US can measure very low flows of water, again with the goal of identifying leaks early, before too much water goes to waste. The iPerl technology, developed by Sensus, not only helps water companies get smarter about resource management, but is itself smart: a solid-state design with no moving parts, and made of recyclable materials.

In a world where population growth, rising urbanization and climate change are all putting pressure on supplies of clean, fresh water for drinking and other uses, water quality controls will also have to become a whole lot smarter. After all, if large numbers of us become dependent on drinking reclaimed wastewater — as a recent report from the US National Research Council (NRC) suggested — we’ll want plenty of reassurances that it’s safe to do so.

“The very nature of water reuse suggests that nearly any substance used or excreted by humans has the potential to be present at some concentration in the treated product,” the NRC report stated. “Modern analytical technology allows detection of chemical and biological contaminants at levels that may be far below human and environmental health relevance.”

That’s a major oversight, considering all the sustainability challenges related to the marine environment:

• There is, of course, ever more dissolved carbon dioxide and the increasing acidity of ocean water — both effects of rising atmospheric carbon levels and both a threat to numerous species of marine life.
• Then there’s the “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch,” a wide swath of trash that swirls slowly in the North Pacific Ocean Gyre. (There’s one in the Atlantic as well.)
• Now, scientists have identified yet another source of ocean pollution: “microplastics” believed to be released by synthetic-fiber clothing during washing. Wastewater with these tiny bits of polyester and acrylic “smaller than the head of a pin” eventually ends up in the world’s oceans, where that plastic appears to be entering the food chain.
• The Earth’s biosphere-ocean nitrogen cycle has also been pushed past a dangerous tipping point, with nutrient-rich runoff from fertilized agricultural lands creating more than 400 oxygen-poor “dead zones” in the world’s oceans, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

“A worldwide transition to a low-carbon, resource-efficient green economy will not be possible unless the seas and oceans are a key part of these urgently needed transformations,” states the UNEP report, “Green Economy in a Blue World.”

The report offers a number of recommendations for making oceans are included in the economic equation:

• Better recognition of the oceans’ ecosystem services in policy planning and investment decisions, and better pricing of ocean-based goods and services.
• Stronger ocean science to identify the many little-understood “links and dependencies in the marine environment.”
• Better regional and global frameworks to overcome limited power of individual governments to fight the “tragedy of the commons” affecting the world’s oceans.
• A move away from “brown-economy” subsidies that harm the oceans and their resources.
• An economic vision that considers not just GDP but issues like equity, security, maintenance of natural capital and other benefits to society.

“Greening our ocean economies is a challenge that needs commitment from each of us — as the individual consumer, investor, entrepreneur or politician,” the report concludes. “For countries, greening their marine economies means diversification, stronger resilience to economic or environmental shocks and sustainable prosperity.”

New research from chemical engineers at Pennsylvania State University, though, has identified a simpler and more affordable way to harness Moringa’s purification powers.

The secret, according to Stephanie B. Velegol and her colleagues, lies with adding an extract from the seeds — which contains a positively charged protein — to negatively charged sand. The resulting “functionalized sand,” or “f-sand,” not only helps to kill bacteria in water but helps to remove them as sediment.

The process makes it possible to produce clean, storable water for drinking using just seeds and sand.

One problem with previous methods for using Moringa seeds is that, used alone, the seeds also release other proteins and organic matter into the water. Those materials can eventually encourage new pathogens to grow, preventing the ability to store the treated water safely for later use. The new method of adding sand eliminates that concern by depositing the proteins on sand, which can then be removed through a rinsing process.

“Overall, these results open the possibility that (f-sand) can provide a simple, locally sustainable process for producing storable drinking water,” the researchers write.

Currently, some one billion people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America rely on untreated surface water sources for their daily drinking and cooking needs. An estimated two million people — most of them children under the age of five — die from water-borne diseases every year.

That’s the message underpinning GLOBE International’s “Natural Capital Action Plan,” a guide to help governments “reconcile economic and environmental interests.” The global legislators’ organisation’s plan was issued during the Convention on Biodiversity summit taking place in Nagoya, Japan.

“Natural capital refers to those aspects of the natural environment that deliver socio-economic value through ecosystem services,” states the GLOBE report. “Currently, natural capital is not comprehensively recorded and therefore not fully recognised in policy-making processes. By not including the value of ecosystem services in the cost benefit analysis of policy options, decision makers are often choosing solutions that are detrimental to a country’s stock of natural capital.”

Accounting for and protecting natural capital is considered more critical than ever, as many scientists and conservationists believe we are now in the midst of the planet’s sixth great extinction event.

The GLOBE plan recommends that governments:

• Create a minister-level position with responsibility for managing a country’s natural wealth;
• Develop a comprehensive set of natural capital accounts and a report showing which policy choices were affected by integrating the true value of ecosystem services;
• Establish a ministerial committee to ensure all government departments account for natural capital in their policies and programmes;
• Encourage national audit offices to consider natural capital when assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of government resource use;
• Emphasise that “investing in natural capital” can benefit both the economy and society, and that restoring and conserving the environment can help achieve mainstream public policy goals.

In a separate report released the same day, GLOBE also highlighted several natural capital-focused success stories from around the world, including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which was recently rezoned to prohibit all resource extraction, including fishing, across one-third of the preserve; Brazilian state tax revenue redistribution to municipalities based on environmental indicators; and China’s Sloping Land Conversion Programme, which has so far enrolled around 23 million hectares of land for afforestation.

China in recent years has taken the number-one spot on sustainability issues in both good and bad ways. Bad: it’s now the world’s largest consumer of energy and the world’s top greenhouse gas emitter. Good: it’s become a leading producer of cheap, energy-efficient light-bulbs and low-cost photovoltaics. And then there’s the bit-of-both category: China is also the world’s largest producer, by far, of rare-earth materials, which are critical for green technologies from electric-car batteries to energy-capturing wind turbines.

That achievement has undoubtedly been good for China.  But for the rest of the world, not so much, as we’re now seeing with China’s apparent, though officially unacknowledged, embargo of rare-earth minerals to Japan, the US and Europe.

Two sparks — one small, one considerably more weighty — apparently set off this brouhaha. The first involved Japan’s detention of the captain (who’s since been released) of a Chinese fishing boat in Japanese waters. China responded, unofficially, by cutting off shipments of rare-earth materials to Japan. The second concerns a complaint by the United Steelworkers union that China is engaged in unfair and illegal trade practices regarding green technologies; the United States Trade Representative last Friday announced it would investigate those concerns.

Shortly after Friday’s announcement, some Chinese rare-earth shipments to the US and Europe also came to a quiet stop.

And so here we stand, with some of the world’s major economies held in limbo on various cleantech fronts, hostage to an embargo that doesn’t officially exist, yet stings all the same. This, then, is the dangerous downside of a cost- and efficiency-maximised global supply chain: the possibility that the cheapest, best and hitherto most-reliable source of critical materials can suddenly decide to take its ball and go home. It’s a questionable strategy for China over the long run, but — in the short term — a disturbing and disruptive game of chicken for the rest of the world.

“TEEB has documented not only the multi-trillion dollar importance to the global economy of the natural world, but the kinds of policy-shifts and smart market mechanisms that can embed fresh thinking in a world beset by a rising raft of multiple challenges,” said TEEB study leader, Pavan Sukhdev, a banker who heads up the Green Economy Initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “The good news is that many communities and countries are already seeing the potential of incorporating the value of nature into decision-making.”

The TEEB study was released today during the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 10th Conference of Parties meeting in Nagoya, Japan.

Among the natural services the TEEB report put values to:

• $50 billion: The annual cost of opportunities lost through over-exploitation of global fisheries.
• €153 billion: The total value, in 2005, of insect pollination. That figure represents 9.5 per cent of the world’s agricultural output of human food that year.
• $30 billion to $172 billion: The annual value of human welfare benefits provided by coral reefs.
• $20 million to $67 million: The benefit, over a four-year period, of a tree planting programme in Canberra, Australia. Local authorities there have planted 400,000 trees to regulate microclimate and reduce pollution; the effort also helped to improve urban air quality, reduce energy costs for air-conditioning and store and sequester carbon.
• $6.5 billion: Savings reaped by New York by investing in maintenance of natural water purification services in the Catskills watershed ($1 billion to $1.5 billion) rather than opt for the man-made solution of a filtration plant ($6 billion to $8 billion, plus $300 million to $500 million in annual operating costs).
• 50: The number of millionaires (in rupees) in Hiware Bazaar, India, created through the regeneration of 70 hectares of degraded forests. This led to the number of active wells in the surrounding area doubling, grass production increasing and income from agriculture increasing due to the enhancement of local ecosystem services.

Countries such as India have already announced plans for implementing the economic valuation of their natural capital as well as the value of nature’s services in decision-making.

“The time for ignoring biodiversity and persisting with conventional thinking regarding wealth creation and development is over,” Sukhdev said. “We must get on to the path towards a green economy.”

The TEEB study concludes with the following recommendations:

1. Public disclosure of — and accountability for — impacts on nature should be essential outcomes of the biodiversity assessment.
2. The present system of national accounts should be rapidly upgraded to include the value of changes in natural capital stocks and ecosystem service flows.
3. An urgent priority is to draw up consistent physical accounts for forest stocks and ecosystem services, both of which are required, for example, for the development of new forest carbon mechanisms and incentives.
4. The annual reports and accounts of business and other organisations should disclose all major externalities, including environmental damage affecting society and changes in natural assets not currently disclosed in the statutory accounts.
5. The principles of “No Net Loss” or “Net Positive Impact” should be considered as normal business practice, using robust biodiversity performance benchmarks and assurance processes to avoid and mitigate damage, together with pro-biodiversity investment to compensate for adverse impacts that cannot be avoided.
6. The principles of “polluter pays” and “full-cost-recovery” are powerful guidelines for the realignment of incentive structures and fiscal reform. In some contexts, the principle of “beneficiary pays” can be invoked to support new positive incentives such as payments for ecosystem services, tax breaks and other fiscal transfers that aim to encourage private and public sector actors to provide ecosystem services.
7. Governments should aim for full disclosure of subsidies, measuring and reporting them annually so their perverse components can be recognised, tracked and eventually phased out.
8. The establishment of comprehensive, representative, effective and equitably managed systems of national and regional protected areas should be pursued (especially in the high seas) to conserve biodiversity and maintain a wide range of ecosystem services. Ecosystem valuation can help to justify protected areas policy, identify funding and investment opportunities, and inform conservation priorities.
9. Ecosystem conservation and restoration should be regarded as a viable investment option in support of climate change mitigation and adaptation.
10. Human dependence on ecosystem services, and particularly their role as a lifeline for many poor households, needs to be more fully integrated into policy. This applies both to targeting development interventions as well as to evaluating the social impacts of policies that affect the environment.

Released last week, the 2010 edition of WWF’s biennial Living Planet Report indicates that people are now using up 50 per cent more natural resources than the planet can sustain. Produced in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network, the report measures the health of almost 8,000 populations of more than 2,500 species.

“There is an alarming rate of biodiversity loss in low-income, often tropical countries while the developed world is living in a false paradise, fuelled by excessive consumption and high carbon emissions,” said Jim Leape, director general of WWF International.

Among the key numbers in the report:

• 60: Percentage by which the Living Planet Index — a measure of the health of biodiversity — has declined in the tropics since 1970.
• 1 1/2: Number of years it would take to renew the natural resources people consume in just one year.
• 2: Number of Earths we would need by 2030 under a business-as-usual scenario.
• 71: Number of countries feeling stress on blue water resources (ie, sources of water people use and don’t return to nature).
• 5: Number of major threats to biodiversity — habitat loss, over-exploitation of wild species, pollution, climate change and invasive species.
• 29: A rare bit encouraging news — percentage by which the Living Planet Index has increased in temperate regions since 1970.
• 2: Factor by which our global ecological footprint  has increased since 1966.
• 500 million: Number of people worldwide whose lives have been negatively affected by construction of dams.
• 62: Percentage of UK’s water footprint that is virtual water (ie, not consumed directly but embedded in the commodities and other products consumed by Britons).
• 2 millions: Tonnes of sewage and effluent that drain into world waterways every day
• 52: Percentage of marine fish stocks that are being exploited to the maximum, with no room for further expansion.
• 15: Percentage of man-made greenhouse gas emissions caused by deforestation.

The 10 countries with the largest per-capita ecological footprints are, in order, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Denmark, Belgium, United States, Estonia, Canada, Australia, Kuwait and Ireland. The footprint measurement takes into account impacts on carbon, grazing, forests, fishing, cropland and built-up land.

“Countries that maintain high levels of resource dependence are putting their own economies at risk,” said Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network. “Those countries that are able to provide the highest quality of life on the lowest amount of ecological demand will not only serve the global interest, they will be the leaders in a resource-constrained world.”

That recovery has come through years of effort by the UK’s Environment Agency and numerous other organisations and individuals. The work has paid off not only in rebounding biodiversity and fisheries, but in the form of the world’s largest environmental award, the International Theiss River Prize.

The prize, which recognises achievement in river management and restoration, went to the Thames over hundreds of other rivers across every continent. Among the other waterways that made the finals were China’s famous Yellow River, Hattah Lakes in Australia and the Smirnykh Rivers Partnership.

“In the last 150 years the Thames has been to hell and back, and it has taken thousands of people many decades to restore it to this point,” said Alastair Driver, national conservation manager for the Environment Agency. “Tighter regulation of polluting industries and our work with farmers, businesses and water companies to reduce pollution and improve water quality, have all helped to make the Thames a living river once again.”

Driver added, “But the recovery is fragile, and under increasing pressure from a growing population, ageing infrastructure and climate change. Through innovative projects such as the Thames Tideway tunnels and the London Rivers Action Plan, we and all of the people and organisations we work with are proving that we are tackling these challenges head on to ensure that the Thames remains an iconic river for many centuries to come.”

Between 1990 and 2008, the chemical quality of the rivers within the Thames catchment classed as “very good” or “good” has improved from 53 per cent to 80 per cent. The estuary today also supports viable shellfisheries and is a nursery ground for commercial sole and bass stocks. The numbers of fish are increasing, with 125 different species recorded, including internationally important smelt and shad.

Since April 2005, 393 habitat enhancement projects have been completed and nearly 70 kilometres of river has been restored or enhanced.

The Environment Agency has pledged the $350,000 (Australian Dollars) in prize money to the Thames Rivers Restoration Trust. Part of the prize fund will be used by the Trust to establish a twinning project to help restore a river in the developing world.

“The Thames is one of our most precious assets, so I am thrilled to see that efforts to improve and preserve its good health are being lauded on the world stage,” said London Mayor Boris Johnson.

The Environment Agency’s submission for the international river prize focused on five innovative projects put in place to further improve the quality of the Thames and its tributaries:

• Working with farmers, which has helped to reduce pollution from nutrients and pesticides.
• The Jubilee River Flood Alleviation Scheme, which has created a new 11-kilometre stretch of naturalistic river and habitats, whilst delivering flood protection to 5,500 homes.
• The London Rivers Action Plan, which is helping restore London’s urban rivers, with 58 new river restoration projects in progress since its launch in 2009.
• The London Tideway Tunnels, a £3.6-billion scheme tackling the 39 million tonnes of storm sewer overflows that enter the tidal Thames annually.
• Thames Estuary 2100, a 100-year adaptable plan to ensure the future sustainable management of tidal flood risk in the Thames estuary, and protecting over 1.25 million people and £200 billion in property value.
• The London Tideway Improvements, which comprise three Thames Water schemes to tackle the 39 million tonnes of storm sewer overflows that enter the tidal Thames in an average year. These are the £675-million Sewage Works Upgrades, the £6350-million Lee Tunnel and the proposed Thames Tunnel, with an estimated cost of £3.6 billion.

Four out of every five people today live in areas exposed to “high levels of threat to water security,” an international team of scientists recently reported. The team’s study was the first worldwide assessment to account for both the human and biodiversity impacts of water security, and the results were sobering, to say the least.

Water problems exist in both developed and developing countries, the scientists found. A key difference is that developed nations have to money to manage the symptoms, though their massive investments aren’t remedying the underlying causes. Lacking similar financial resources, developing countries are far more vulnerable to their water problems, the study found.

Across the globe, those water problems are also posing a great threat to biodiversity in bodies of fresh water, with some 65 per cent of such habitats being either “moderately” or “highly” threatened.

Scientists involved in the study say the framework they developed could help decision-makers craft better policies and management responses. It also “underscores the necessity of limiting threats at their source instead of through costly remediation of symptoms,” they write.

Taking that approach is not only better for nature and humans, but better for society’s bottom line, according to the just-published “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Ecological and Economic Foundations,” the first of a four-volume study calculating the monetary value of nature’s services. For instance, the cost to plant and protect some 12,000 hectares of mangrove in Vietnam — about $1.1 million — might seem steep to a developing country, but the results are more than worth in. In this case, the planting resulted in a savings on dyke maintenance of $7.3 million a year.

Besides changing our focus from treating symptoms to solving problems, we also need more and better data about how water is being used and how much is available in different parts of the globe, according to the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute (IWMI). Such information is hard to come by for different reasons. In the developed West, privatisation of water resources is partly to blame; when water companies look to cut costs, monitoring and data collection are often the first to go. And in other parts of the world, the money to accurately track water supplies often isn’t there in the first place.

Satellite-based sensing could soon help fill in those data gaps, says Colin Chartres, director of the IWMI and co-author of the book, “Out of Water: From Abundance to Scarcity and How to Solve the World’s Water Problems.” And a change in agricultural practices will be absolutely necessary to avert a crisis, he adds … especially as farming in some parts of the world already consumes as much as 90 per cent of local water resources. That can’t continue on a planet in which both human population and food requirements are both projected to keep growing.

“I don’t think we will reach crisis point,” Chartres tells the publication Nature, “because we will put in place technological solutions to help close the gap between supply and demand.”

For some parts of the world, those solutions had better be arriving quickly. A statement last week from South Africa’s Environment and Conservation Association, for example, warned that 80 per cent of the country’s water will be undrinkable within the next five years … and that no purification process available today could solve that problem. And emergency personnel in Hungary today are working desperately to prevent a deadly leak of toxic sludge from entering the Danube and Raba rivers.