Solving the Water Problem | Breakthrough

Our lifestyles are very thirsty, and it's not just the water that comes out of the tap at home. You know, if we think about our daily lifestyle, everything we use, and where and buy and eat takes water to make, and sometimes really a surprising amount. It can be 30 gallons of water just to make a glass of wine.

Energy is another really water-intensive thing. You know, it takes about 13 gallons of water to make one gallon of fuel. To the extent we can walk, carpool, bike, those are saving energy but also saving water. Do we have to have brand new clothes? Can we share? Can we recycle? Every time we get something from a thrift store, we've got something new, but it's not taking additional water to make it new.

So there's a lot of opportunity to actually be part of the solution. Most of our water use and water management has been around controlling water with dams and diversions to supply water when and where we need it. And that's allowed places like the western United States to really grow and flourish and expand and become major food-producing areas for the whole nation and parts of the world.

What we haven't done is really bring nature to the table. We haven't really decided that ecosystems themselves deliver a lot of benefits to us, which they do in the form of purifying water, you know, fish and biodiversity habitats, clean drinking water.

And so I think governments and industries that are figuring out how water is allocated and used can begin to bring that important piece of nature into the picture. Policies can help do that; markets can help do that. In some ways, I think the new frontier of water management is going to be bringing together efficiency technologies like drip irrigation, which is used in agriculture, with information technologies that allow us to know how much water is really in the soil right now.

How much water do those crops really need so that we can target delivering just the right amount of water when crops need it, to make sure that they get what they need, but not necessarily more than they need? Right now, agriculture consumes about 80 percent of all the water that's used in the West, and so if we can get more efficient and more targeted about delivering that water, we can free up water for the natural environment.