Russell Sticklor

As our global population concentrates itself in cities, urban areas are becoming increasingly vulnerable from a food security standpoint. Some cities are already sitting on a knife’s edge with regard to food security, with comparatively small stockpiles of locally available food reserves in the event food shipments arriving by road, air, or sea are disrupted unexpectedly.

Rainwater harvesting has been practiced for millennia throughout the world yet rainwater harvesting is still unknown to many communities. Recent innovations offer opportunities for expansion.

What if a virtually unlimited energy supply like the sun could be effectively combined with the planet’s seawater supply to help ease global water scarcity issues? In their recently published paper (open access until Sept 2014), Sood and Smakhtin of IWMI assert that using renewable energy to purify seawater could one day revolutionize desalination.

Underground storage presents some intriguing possibilities to defuse seasonal water-related tensions between communities or even countries.

To improve our resiliency to a shifting climate and extend our growing seasons, we must seriously consider not just pumping groundwater to the surface, as we have always done, but also storing today’s surface waters underground to ensure our water security for tomorrow.

Unlike transportation, medicine, and even dam-building — all of which have experienced game-changing technological innovations during the past half century — canal irrigation has remained largely a technologically stagnant sector since the days of the Green Revolution