Time passes and in addition to gaining wisdom, it is also expected that this house that we inhabit and where no one should be left over, we squeeze it daily without noticing the thousands of liters or gallons consumed without taking care of the water that we waste, resulting in unsustainable and irresponsible. The intergenerational solidarity that perhaps has as its source the teaching of the Brundtland report, which put the concept of sustainability on the table 23 years ago, has been confronting us, day by day and gradually, the finiteness of water resources and that children of our children they will ask us not very happy accounts of why we gave them a “desolate house” in circumstances that we received it differently.
Thus, to better manage this liability, we first began to measure the carbon footprint and soon the water footprint, which involves us in taking care of water resources not only because of their finiteness, already known, but because the water cycle we started to modify it and that “Sowing winds we reap storms”, like the irrefutable phenomenon of the breakdown of the ozone layer and then climate change and our necessary adaptation. After more than 10 times of water shortage, we appreciate the efforts made to rationalize the use of water in activities such as mining that use 3 and 4 times the water and improvements in agricultural practices should also be recognized with a larger and more efficient irrigation network and drip fertilization, accompanied by the creation and start-up of new reservoirs of dissimilar size.
Unfortunately in the driest desert in the world, such as ours, a mining company illegally extracted for years, through more than 35 wells, 25% of the natural recharge of the Pampa del Tamarugal Aquifer. There was a lawsuit for environmental damage whose judgment did not include the requirement that forced it to recharge the aquifer by injecting H20, technically possible, since at that date the drought in the City of Barcelona had been resolved through injection from tankers or cisterns to the facilities of the Spanish Sanitary Company.
Looking at an individual scale, the amount of water needed to produce a good or service with its corresponding water footprint is already measured and it will be necessary to take into account that 10,000 liters were consumed in order to have a jeans; 2400 liters for 100 grams of chocolate or 180 liters for 1 kilo of tomatoes.
Perhaps now is the time to act accordingly.
* In memory of Juan Escudero Ortúzar and tribute to the recent Cervantes Prize awarded to Raúl Zurita. The New Life, Song to the Rivers that is lovedn http://www.letras.mysite.com/zurita080102.htm
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