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🌾Protecting Harvests Part 5 – Floating Gardens ⛵🌾
🌾Protecting Harvests Part 5 – Floating Gardens ⛵🌾 So far, all of the previous solutions in the “Protecting Harvests” category dealt with adaptation to water scarcity. But what if too little water is not the issue but rather too much water? In regions where intense flooding regularly wipe out entire harvests, adaptation will become inevitable…
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Conquering Droughts Part 3: Artificial Glaciers 🧊🏔
Conquering Droughts Part 3: Artificial Glaciers 🧊🏔 All over the world, humans depend on meltwater in summer to sustain agriculture or ensure river transportation. For instance, the Rhine in central Europe consisted of 20% glacier meltwater during the extreme drought in 2003 [1]. Climate change diminishes meltwater quantities in summer. With warmer winters, less precipitation…
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🌾Protecting Harvests Part 4 – Breeding Drought Resistant Crops 🌽🌾
Droughts threaten our food production! In the last decade, crop failure due to drought lead to losses of 32 Billion USD in low income countries alone (FAO, https://www.fao.org/resources/digital-reports/disasters-in-agriculture/en/). Climate change will exercabate this crisis, since droughts will become more frequent. We need to adapt farming to ensure harvests and protect global food supply. Besides using…
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🌊Flood Resilience Part 3: Water Squares 💧🏙
Watersquares help us adapt our citys to climate change impacts. Climate change causes stronger and more frequent heavy rain. These rainfalls can cause severe floodings in sealed urban areas. Therefore, retaining stormwater in cities becomes increasingly necessary. However, space is scarce and there are already conflicts of use in public city squares. An innovative method…
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🆘 Navigating Risks & Disasters: Public Aid ⛑👥
Climate Impacts and society Within the last month we have seen a variety of natural disasters, often concering heavy rainfall events and flooding. With climate warming continuously escalating, the probability for such disasters also increases. While the techniques presented in this newsletter are tremendously usefull in the mitigation and adaptation to some of the risks…
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🌾Protecting Harvests Part 3 – Water Efficient Irrigation 🚜💧
Its summer in the northern hemisphere with many places in central Europe already having metrological droughts. Low rainfall and high temperatures put agriculture under stress with plants wilting and harvests shrinking. Climate change, exacerbates this issue, as the higher summer temperatures also increase evaporation, further lowering plant available water. To counteract plant loss, farmers go…
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🌾Protecting Harvests Part 2 – Agrivoltaics 🌤🔌🌽
This issue of WaterWednesday is mostly written by RICHMOND KULEAPE. Richmond is a dedicated researcher currently working at the Fraunhofer-Institut für Solare Energiesysteme ISE since March 2023. Prior to this, he served as a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) starting from September 2022. Alongside his academic pursuits, Richmond is actively…
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🚰 Ensuring Save Water Supply Part 1 – Wastewater Treatment Plant Upgrades ♻💧
♻ Wastewater Treatment Plants and Climate Change In a world where water gets more and more scarce, we must protect whats still available at all cost. Untreated wastewater discharge threatens river ecology and the water supply of downstream communities. While riverwater is not directly used for drinking, the water is often treated through river bank…
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🌾Protecting Harvests Part 1 – Aquaponics 🐟🥬
🌾🌡 Climate Change & Agriculture With climate change leading to more hydrologic droughts (see in this WaterWednesday) and increased surface drying, agriculture becomes more and more threatened. Some crops cant go long without water, thus resulting in crop losses, endangering food security. While irrigation can help, groundwater, which is often used to water plants during dry…
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🌊Flood Resilience Part 2: Sponge Cities 🧽🏙
🛣🏜 Cities, aka sealed asphalt deserts Our cities are currently build to drain rainwater FAST! With surface sealing by asphalted streets and concrete houses, rainwater is mostly directly converted to runoff. This runoff is then channeled into sewers, which (in case of a mixed sewer) should guide it to a wastewater treatment plant. With increases…