{"id":191669,"date":"2024-06-23T14:23:41","date_gmt":"2024-06-23T19:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/to-solve-global-water-scarcity-we-need-to-get-more-serious-about-desalination"},"modified":"2024-06-23T14:23:41","modified_gmt":"2024-06-23T19:23:41","slug":"to-solve-global-water-scarcity-we-need-to-get-more-serious-about-desalination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/to-solve-global-water-scarcity-we-need-to-get-more-serious-about-desalination","title":{"rendered":"To solve global water scarcity, we need to get more serious about desalination"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/to-solve-global-water-scarcity-we-need-to-get-more-serious-about-desalination2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Earth\u2019s H2O is 97 percent seawater, and most of the remaining 3 percent is inaccessible, frozen in glaciers or permafrost. Only a small portion, about half of a percent, exists as freshwater in aquifers and rivers that humans can tap into. A process called, however, allows us to dip into the oceans to satisfy our thirst.<\/p>\n<p>Desal has been around for decades and is used to make both seawater and salty groundwater drinkable. But scientists think that it will become increasingly important in a warmer, drier future. In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0048969718349167\/\/\/\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">a recent UN-led review<\/a>, researchers stated that \u201c\u2018conventional\u2019 sources of water such as rainfall, snowmelt and river runoff captured in lakes, rivers, and aquifers are no longer sufficient to meet human demands in water-scarce areas.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>During a media roundtable at the 2019 American Geophysical Union conference, Peter Fiske, director of the Water-Energy Resilience Research Institute at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, discussed why we might need to more strongly consider this technology\u2014at times written off for its high costs and energy use\u2014to stabilize water supplies in the future. Here\u2019s what you need to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earth\u2019s H2O is 97 percent seawater, and most of the remaining 3 percent is inaccessible, frozen in glaciers or permafrost. Only a small portion, about half of a percent, exists as freshwater in aquifers and rivers that humans can tap into. A process called, however, allows us to dip into the oceans to satisfy our [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}