drought

U of T undergrad tests out solar-powered irrigation system in his native South Sudan

ullahnor — Mon, 01 May 2017 16:11:10 +0000

U of T undergrad tests out solar-powered irrigation system in his native South Sudan

ullahnor Mon, 05/01/2017 - 12:11

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James Thuch Madhier, a third-year peace, conflict and justice student at the Munk School of Global Affairs, has launched Rainmaker Enterprise with U of T colleagues (photo by Bibi Veth)

Elaine Smith

Author legacy

Elaine Smith

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Global Lens

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

drought

Water

Farming

International

Global

Social Entrepreneurship

Undergraduate Students

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James Thuch Madhier came to U of T through the Student Refugee Program

James Thuch Madhier fled South Sudan as a teenager, escaping the ravages of civil war and famine.

Next fall, the U of T undergrad and his social entrepreneurship team will be testing out their solar-powered crop irrigation system on 20 acres of land they've acquired in South Sudan.

“I see it as a model that we can scale up across the country and region,” Madhier said. “I believe in a ground-up approach. It’s a way for local farmers to increase production and efficiency so that they are not simply doing subsistence farming.”

Madhier came from South Sudan via Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya through U of T's Student Refugee Program (SRP), which sponsors refugees in collaboration with the World University Service of Canada.

Now a third-year peace, conflict and justice student at U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs, Madhier has worked with his classmates, Mike Hongryul Park, a math and physics student with a passion for sustainable development, and Katie Fettes, a fellow peace, conflict and justice student at Munk, to create a basic, solar-powered crop irrigation system that provides clean drinking water to countries in the developing world.

The team's system, which includes a pump, a holding tank for the seasonal flood waters, solar panels to generate power and drip irrigation, is easy to install and use in South Sudan, where 80 per cent of residents are farmers or raise cattle, only 30 per cent have access to clean drinking water and 5.1 per cent of the population has electricity.

“We’ve adapted the system in a way that will not only irrigate food crops and provide grazing grass for cattle, but will also offer employment to women and youth and address issues of food insecurity,” Madhier said.

In 2016, Madhier, who has long been active with social development programs, was invited by the One Young World organization to attend a global summit for young social changemakers. The summit included a social venture competition, and Madhier and Park decided this was the perfect opportunity to seek assistance with the irrigation project.

Madhier pitched the idea at the summit and won a fellowship award as well as some seed capital and access to professionals who can mentor him.

This past March, the team formally launched Rainmaker Enterprise in partnership with Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier-turned-musician from South Sudan, and they purchased land in South Sudan to test out the irrigation system during the November dry season.

For the project, the land will be divided so that cows can graze in one area while crops can be grown in another area. It will allow for crop rotation so the land remains productive for both food and grazing. Madhier has a local field manager who will hire a local team to assist him, creating a self-sustaining enterprise.

Madhier says that as a teenager he saw some horrific things during the famine.

“Thiet, my hometown, attracted people from all over the countryside who were suffering,” he said. “In the mornings, you’d see the collection of people who had died of hunger overnight. Sights like these are toxic to the brain.”

After a trip to the Ivory Coast last year to research issues surrounding cocoa farming, Madhier realized that the problems of drought and food insecurity were much more widespread in Africa than he’d realized and decided to do something about it – not a quick fix solution, but something that would effect systemic change.

“Today, I know there has been technological advancement that could be used to lift people out of extreme hunger and food insecurity,” he said.

Running on empty: U of T's Nick Eyles explores California’s historic drought for the CBC

lavende4 — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 16:00:20 +0000

Running on empty: U of T's Nick Eyles explores California’s historic drought for the CBC

lavende4 Thu, 10/20/2016 - 12:00

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Nick Eyles in the Atacama desert

Don Campbell

Author legacy

Don Campbell

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Nick Eyles has a passion for taking audiences on geological treks around the globe. As host of Geologic Journey for CBC’s The Nature of Things, he explored earth’s natural treasures while helping viewers unpack how our planet works.

Now, the ��Ƶ Scarborough environmental science professor is turning his attention to California where an historic drought is ravaging the state, affecting not only farmers and city dwellers, but the natural environment as well. His new documentary Running on Empty, airs at 8 p.m. Oct. 20 on CBC Television.

Eyles, who is a recipient of the McNeil Medal from the Royal Society of Canada for communicating science to the public, spoke to writer Don Campbell about the drought that is unfolding in the Golden State.

Is it fair to say that the drought taking place in California is a natural disaster of an epic scale?

It certainly is, and I think it may well be a crucial turning point in the history of California. It has the potential to be much more damaging than earthquakes because it affects such a large area. It’s a pretty desperate situation. It’s the hottest and driest drought the state has experienced in 100 years, and a big worry is that it’s just the beginning of something longer. If you look at the record of recent climate preserved in tree rings and lake floor sediment, you can get a picture of paleo climates dating back thousands of years with mega droughts that lasted hundreds of years. What’s troubling is that this one is different because the temperature is hotter, so you’re getting more evaporation and more deadly bushfires. It’s beginning to look more and more like the beginnings of another megadrought.

What’s causing the drought?

It’s a deadly combination. There’s natural climate variability, which is basically being driven by sea surface temperature and complex patterns of ocean circulation not yet fully appreciated. Times of cool ocean waters and high pressure atmospheric systems appear to result in a lack of moisture inland. The fundamental problem has been lack of snow across the Sierra Nevada because this feeds groundwater below the Central Valley and rivers. Then, you have human-made climate warming, the full magnitude of which has yet to play out. And then there’s dramatic overuse of existing water by industry, agriculture and city dwellers. Quite simply, they are pumping water at rates that aren’t sustainable, especially with population growth.

The surface water allocation policies that are supposed to regulate how much river water any particular city can have were written many decades ago when there was more snow in the mountains, so they’re no longer valid under drought conditions. Then you have an old creaky administrative system, different water rights holders and a legal system that is incredibly Byzantine. The system can’t react quickly enough. There’s also massive overpumping of groundwater that is lowering the water table and actually sinking the Central Valley as water is pumped from underlying sediment, but they’re also lacking hydrogeological data and suitable management plans. This is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. They are accelerating their studies of groundwater, but it takes decades to collect data and get accurate models, and the problem is right now.

What about conservation efforts?

Conservation has worked a bit, but it has lured people into a false sense of security. People began to relax a bit once they started conserving water especially with the wet winter last year, which unfortunately didn’t add much snow up in the mountains.

There is coastal desalinization, where seawater is converted at great expense, but building plants has been controversial, and new ones are far in the future. There have been significant efforts in treating wastewater, and this will grow in importance. Cities that used to dump treated sewage into rivers now can’t do that because the rivers are dry. They’ve developed highly innovative techniques to clean that water, which now goes to farms for irrigation.

How is the drought affecting the natural environment?

The natural environment is the big loser in all of this. Most of the water comes from snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which then flows out west towards the Pacific Ocean but most of that is being diverted, taken south by canals to cities and the farms in the Central Valley and then piped up to Los Angeles. Some former wetlands now look like stubble fields. Some water has been diverted back to the natural environment in recent years, but in most people’s minds this is wasted because it flows back out to the Pacific. They fail to appreciate the aquatic ecosystems that are dependent on that water.

The saddest part for me was driving up the Sierra Nevada and seeing black bears all over the place. Normally they’re up in the mountains, feeding off berries. But there aren’t any, so they’re in the valley starving and scavenging for acorns. The Salton Sea, which used to be a large inland lake, has now dried out and is literally a dust bowl. As we were pulling out of the area one evening, a wall of dust was being blown up valley. It’s man-made environmental degradation on a massive scale. It just drove home the point that when it comes to water, the natural environment is a distant fourth behind cities, agriculture and industry.

What is the mood among farmers in California?

It’s pretty pessimistic. Many farmers have been there for multiple generations. Agriculture also employs a lot of people, and they’re also under a lot of stress financially. They feel unappreciated by city dwellers. They feel that city dwellers see them as greedy. The move away from vegetables to almonds hasn’t helped. Almond growing has become a huge industry because it’s a big cash crop, but you need four litres of water to grow one almond. Some groves are now being uprooted. It’s likely some farming communities will disappear completely.

Do you think the situation can improve?

It takes several years to get a desalinization plant up and running. As impressive as wastewater-treatment plants are, they also take years to plan and build. I think there will be a lot of years of real pain, and it will be the natural environment that suffers the most. I saw bottled drinking water imported from Hawaii and Alaska, even as far as Fiji. Eventually, they will look for water supplies elsewhere, maybe from their northern neighbour. Even without the current drought, they are short of water. What they fundamentally need is a systematic look at how they manage their water resources. This includes both surface and ground water and the creation of a statewide game plan as to how California will get through the next few decades.

Can human behaviour fix the California drought?

sgupta — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 16:29:00 +0000

Can human behaviour fix the California drought? sgupta Mon, 04/20/2015 - 12:29

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photo by docentjoyce via Flickr

Paul Fraumeni

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Paul Fraumeni

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A Q&A with Stephen Scharper

California is experiencing a drought that has gone far beyond a “dry spell”.

In fact, the drought and related water shortage are so profound that Governor Jerry Brown is enacting measures to have Californians cut back on water consumption by 25 per cent and the state is offering citizens ways of changing their green lawns to gardens of cactus. And San Diego County is building a $1 billion plant that will bring water in from the Pacific Ocean and take the salt out of it.

But there are wider issues. Writer Paul Fraumeni explores them with Professor Stephen Scharper.

Sharper, pictured below, is an associate professor of anthropology at U of T Mississauga and at U of T’s School of the Environment. He is also cross-appointed to the department for the study of religion. Scharper focuses his research and teaching in the areas of environmental ethics, religious ethics and ecology, ecological values and world views, and the ethics of violence and nonviolence. He is the author of Redeeming the Time: A Political Theology of the Environment and co-author with his wife, social-cultural anthropologist Hilary Cunningham, of The Green Bible. He is also a columnist for the Toronto Star.

There is, of course, science tied to the global climate change behind this drought. But what is your take on the human behaviour that will need to change to deal with this problem?
Many people have been predicting this for a long time. The Colorado River, which has been diverted and helps a lot of the agriculture in the southwest US, including California, has been running very low and some of the reservoirs will never come back, according to the Environmental Protection Agency in the US. Seventy per cent of the Colorado River is diverted for farmland and 70 per cent of the water used in California is going to farmland.

So it is certainly a question of human behaviour and I’m glad that Governor Brown is calling for a 25 per cent decrease, but so far it’s only in individual and municipal use. Farmlands are off limits. Not to deny the importance of what Governor Brown is doing, but the use of water for farmland needs to be examined if the state is going to address the problem.

As we have seen in the news and based on my own research, this is already leading to a behavioural change in municipalities and in certain parts of the state. People who had green lawns are now converting to desert landscapes and are getting the remittance from municipalities to make that transition.

So part of what is happening is a realization that you can’t simply transplant another ecosystem onto a California desert system or arid southwestern system. In a sense, California and much of the U.S. southwest is living beyond its ecological means. Certain lifestyles have been adopted and crops are being grown that are not endemic or sustainable for this particular bioregion.

But the agricultural sector California is also a major economic force. It’s one of the great agricultural regions of the world. And it employs thousands of people.
Again, news reports have told us the drought is already leading to unemployment. Because there is no water in certain areas, some farms are just not sustainable anymore in terms of what they used to raise. There is water-rich agriculture that goes on in areas that can’t sustain it. People are becoming jobless because they cannot sustain the kind of things they are growing.

But it doesn’t mean that things can’t grow in that area. It means that there has to be a re-examination of what has grown and how it’s grown in terms of the water usage.

Maude Barlow [the Canadian author and environmental advocate who was senior advisor on water to the United Nations in 2008/2009] points out that many water-rich crops are being grown in California and then exported. Rice and hay, for example, are very rich in water retention. In effect, what’s happening is the water of the ecosystem of California is being exported elsewhere and that water is not being replenished.

In North America, is this a problem limited to California?
No. The entire U.S. southwest region has been experiencing an average temperature increase of about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century and it is expected to rise between 2.5 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century. And this trend of warming has already led to a decrease in the snowpack and the Colorado River flow. That’s a crucial source of water. According to the EPA, some of the reservoirs in this area will never be replenished. Throughout the southwest, there are devices called water pivots that are drilled into the ground 380 feet into the water table. These pivots pump water from underground aquifers, which is then sprayed onto the crops. This is a major experiment in agriculture and in water use. And we’re seeing the negative effects.

Jennifer Baichwal’s film Watermark has amazing footage of these water pivots and circular fields in the southwest and how devastating they are. You can see where the aquifer has been depleted and the vegetation over it is going brown. They don’t have the replenishment capabilities that were there before. So while we might be talking about jobs in the short term in California in the agricultural sector, they’re not going to be there in the long term without water.

On a broader scale, if we are going to scale back on the practices that have led us to this global environmental crisis, it’s really going to take big change, isn’t it?
Yes, and that’s where the role of government is very important. The Montreal Protocol is a good example. That was an international protocol that was signed and has met with some success in terms of limiting the use of CFCs because of their effect on the ozone. And there were certain industries affected but those industries were in agreement as long as there was a standard they would all subscribe to.

So, when municipalities and governments take initiative around major change issues, things can get done.

In a completely different area, in World War II, the U.S. government ordered General Motors, Ford and Chrysler not to build any domestic cars. They switched almost overnight to military production. That was because of government legislation.

So it seems there is precedent for legislating environmental behavioural change.
Once you make it easy for people to recycle, it becomes part of their being. I’ve noticed that with my students. They are used to green bins and blue bins. Then they move to another city where there isn’t a municipal recycling program and they feel like they’re committing a sin when they have to throw everything in the garbage. What we’ve done in Toronto wasn’t a major social change with a lot of metaphysical angst for citizens. It was brought about by government policies that made this a standard practice.

So some of these conversations about the enormity of the change that’s required are helpful but they sometimes don’t take into account the effectiveness of unified, legislated action that translates into practice and makes these kinds of things standardized, easy and convenient. Government backing of the recycling program has created a new ethos. And this can happen in other areas of care for the environment too.

This is a moment for not just cutting off personal water use and turning the tap off when you’re brushing your teeth, as important as that is. This is a moment of reflection, invitation and, I hope, legislation that will cause people to think about water use in the industrial sector too. This is for the long-term prosperity of the state and sustainability of the ecosystem.

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