More Purified Water Thanks to technological innovation, wastewater treatment is evolving to successfully handle application of European regulations, which are increasingly stringent. Tertiary treatment or regeneration of wastewater in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is an additional process to purification, aimed at providing the treated water with quality so that it can be used for new…
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Clean Energies on Water
Renewable energies are energies that come from natural sources and have a faster replacement rate than their consumption rate. In other words, they are virtually inexhaustible. This concept, coined by the United Nations, came into use in the 1970s, a result of the oil crisis that revealed the finite nature of fossil fuel reserves. Fifty years later,…
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Groundwater. Invisible, Yet Essential
“Fui sobre agua edificada, mis muros de fuego son, esta es mi insignia y blasón (I was built upon water, my walls are fire, this is my insignia and blazon).” This motto for Madrid, engraved on the shields of Alfonso VIII of Castile’s militias, bore witness to the importance of the water beneath the city. The…
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Responsible Water
When we think of summer, we think of heat, sun, light…and water! Water makes this season easier to bear in many areas of our Peninsula. We need more water exactly during the time of year when it is the scarcest. This tricky combination means we need to be especially careful about how we use it. …
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What is water management like in the international context?
Water knows no regional borders, race, or religion. All living beings on the planet, without distinction, depend on quality water being available. This forceful (and also obvious) statement is at direct odds with the following reality: 2.2 billion people in the world lack access to safely managed drinking water services, and over half of the population does not have…
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Cleaning rivers to protect oceans
Today, plastic is one of the materials we use the most in our daily lives. It is also the most abundant waste we produce. Excessive consumption has led to what we call plastic pollution. Plastic production has increased exponentially since the first synthetic polymer was manufactured in 1909. It is estimated that 350 million tonnes…
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Water and Food
Water and food production are clearly interrelated. Any living being, whether animal or plant, must hydrate for full development and to complete its life cycle. In Spain, the agro-livestock sector is responsible for 80% of global water consumption. In order to improve sustainable management of this resource, we must optimise consumption in these primary sectors,…
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Floods
Global floods and extreme rainfall events have increased by over 50% this decade, and they are now occurring at a rate four times higher than in 1980 (2020 United Nations report ‘Water and Climate Change‘). The main causes of floods: intense precipitation, rising groundwater levels, or rising sea levels and waves in coastal areas. Furthermore,…
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Drought and desertification: Two sides of the same coin?
(Estimated reading time: 5,52 minutes) – Audio version of article available. The ongoing scarcity of precipitation causes meteorological drought, which generally affects large zones and generates the rest of droughts: hydrological, agricultural, socioeconomic, etc. According to the AEMET (Spanish National Weather Agency), Spain has been in a situation of meteorological drought since January of 2022…
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The sea as a biodiversity preserve and carbon sink
(Estimated reading time: 4,20 minutes) –Audio version of article available. As set forth in SDG 14 (UN Sustainable Development Goal) devoted to submarine life, “our rain, potable water, the weather, the climate, the coastlines, a large part of our food and even the oxygen in the air we breathe comes from, and is regulated by,…
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