Reply To: Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
As many as 96 water basins out of the 204 supplying most of the country with freshwater could fail to meet monthly demand starting in 2071, a team of scientists said in the journal Earth’s Future. A water basin is a portion of land where water from rainfall flows downhill toward a river and its tributaries.
“There’s a lot of the U.S. over time that will have less water,” said co-author Thomas Brown, a researcher with the U.S. Forest Service, in a phone interview. “We’ll be seeing some changes.”
The basins affected cover the country’s central and southern Great Plains, the Southwest and central Rocky Mountain states, as well as parts of California, the South and the Midwest, said Brown.
Water shortages would result from increased demand by a growing population, as well shrinking rainfall totals and greater evaporation caused by global warming.
One way to alleviate pressure on water basins would be to reduce irrigation for farming, the scientists said. The agricultural sector can consume more than 75 percent of water in the United States, they said. Farmers could cut their irrigation of industrial crops used primarily for animal feed and biofuels, such as hay, field corn, soybeans, sorghum, millet, rapeseed and switchgrass.