The Artdog Images of Interest
Three major signals of climate change's onset are increased rates and ferocity of fires, deepening drought, and increasingly violent storms. Today's image focuses on drought.
As my Images of Interest series in February emphasized, the United Nations has identified access to safe, clean, affordable drinking water as a basic human right. Yet as drought gets entrenched in regions, this basic human need is not being met. India is one of those areas, but as the map below shows, it is far from alone in its plight.
A serious issue in India is the continued heavy water use by multinational corporations (MNCs) such as Pepsico, without recharging the water tables (as required by law). This is despite the "worst drought in living memory" and dramatic drops in local water tables near their bottling facilities.
Plunging levels of surface water or snowpack during times of drought are often dramatic (see California's Lake Oroville, above). Longer-lasting damage is done, however, when aquifers are depleted and not recharged. What has been happening in India is not an isolated case of industrial short-sightedness. Aquifer depletion is a problem in California, the US Great Plains, Australia, China, Africa, and all over the world. Few people are paying much attention to it yet, but it's a ticking time bomb we all should be working NOW to defuse.
IMAGES: Many thanks to Global Research for the photo of the Indian woman by her well, to the World Resources Institute for the Water Stress map, and to PBS NewsHour for the 2015 photo of Lake Oroville.
Three major signals of climate change's onset are increased rates and ferocity of fires, deepening drought, and increasingly violent storms. Today's image focuses on drought.
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| A woman in India still can get a little water from her well, but she's one of 300 million affected in the country during 2016. |
A serious issue in India is the continued heavy water use by multinational corporations (MNCs) such as Pepsico, without recharging the water tables (as required by law). This is despite the "worst drought in living memory" and dramatic drops in local water tables near their bottling facilities.
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| The 2015 level of California's Lake Oroville at the height of the recent drought was pretty impressive-looking, but as we know, once the drought broke the lake refilled to overflowing. More troublesome and long-lasting was the hit the aquifers took. |
Plunging levels of surface water or snowpack during times of drought are often dramatic (see California's Lake Oroville, above). Longer-lasting damage is done, however, when aquifers are depleted and not recharged. What has been happening in India is not an isolated case of industrial short-sightedness. Aquifer depletion is a problem in California, the US Great Plains, Australia, China, Africa, and all over the world. Few people are paying much attention to it yet, but it's a ticking time bomb we all should be working NOW to defuse.
IMAGES: Many thanks to Global Research for the photo of the Indian woman by her well, to the World Resources Institute for the Water Stress map, and to PBS NewsHour for the 2015 photo of Lake Oroville.
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