How far we go to solve the water crisis - YouTube

Let me take you back to 1977 to a very special gathering. The iceberg was plucked out of the ocean in Alaska, then flown from there to Minneapolis and tracked from there to Ames as part of the first international conference on iceberg utilization. 175 scientists and the Saudi Arabian prince, Muhammad Al-Faisal, met in the US state of Iowa to discuss a truly outlandish idea. They thought about transporting icebergs to places like fresh water. The only question is when is it feasible?

让我带您回到1977年的一次非常特殊的聚会。一座冰山从阿拉斯加的海洋中被捞起，然后从那里飞往明尼阿波利斯，并在此之后被追踪到艾姆斯，作为第一次国际冰山利用会议的一部分。175名科学家和沙特阿拉伯王子穆罕默德·阿尔-法萨尔在美国爱荷华州会面，讨论了一个非常奇特的想法。他们思考将冰山运往像淡水等地方的可能性。唯一的问题是什么时候实现这个想法？

Before we get into that, let's quickly fast forward to today. Water shortages are an even bigger problem than in the 1970s. Climate change messes with rainfall patterns and we also waste a lot of precious water. What if people in the 1970s were unto something? Maybe to stop our taps from running dry, we just need to get more creative. Like looking at the problem from space or harvesting humidity from the air. These type of water resources, they do hold potential. But the question is how much potential? Let's look at three crazy ideas and see if they hold water.

在我们深入探讨之前，让我们快速地前进到今天。水资源短缺问题比1970年代更严重。气候变化干扰了降雨格局，而我们也浪费了很多宝贵的水。如果1970年代的人们是对的呢？也许，为了防止我们的自来水干涸，我们只需要更有创意地解决这个问题。比如从空间角度看问题，或者从空气中获取湿度。这些水资源确实有潜力。但问题是它们到底有多大的潜力？让我们看看三个疯狂的想法，看看它们是否可行。

Heat has exacerbated an ongoing crisis in the US, water scarcity. Water shortage has become a never-ending issue with an approaching global water crisis. The lack of fresh water is not a future problem. Half of the global population experiences water scarcity during at least some parts of the year. Overconsumption, a heating planet and bad water management are draining our groundwater, rivers and lakes worldwide. By the middle of the century, every second country will struggle with limited access to water. To tackle this problem, we need to manage our water better. We need to reuse it and figure out ways to use less of it. But that alone may not be enough. Scientists think that we need to look beyond usual water sources like rainfall, snowfall, river runoff or groundwater.

美国的热浪加剧了一个持续存在的危机——水资源匮乏。由于全球水危机即将来临，水资源短缺已成为一个持续存在的问题。淡水短缺不是将来的问题。全球一半的人口在每年的一些时候都会面临水资源短缺。过度消耗、全球变暖和糟糕的水资源管理使得我们的地下水、河流和湖泊流失。到本世纪中叶，每第二个国家都将面临水资源有限的难题。为了解决这一问题，我们需要更好地管理水资源。我们需要重复利用水资源，并想出使用更少水资源的方法。但是仅仅这些可能不够。科学家认为，我们需要超越通常的水资源来源，如降雨量、积雪量、河流径流或地下水。

And this brings us back to the iceberg conference in Iowa. Honestly, the whole thing was above all a big media spectacle. The iceberg chunk flown in from Alaska was eventually chopped up for Martinez at the Cocktail Party. Creating a rare situation when the ice cubes were worth more than the drink. After the conference, the hype around the topic quickly subsided. There were next to no substantial advances in using Arctic ice as drinking water. It seemed the whole thing was put on ice, pardon the pun, until recently.

这让我们想起了在爱荷华州举行的冰山会议。说实话，整个会议最重要的是一个大型媒体宣传活动。从阿拉斯加运来的冰块最终被切碎了，用于马丁内斯的鸡尾酒聚会。这创造了一个罕见的情况，冰块比饮料更值钱。会议结束后，对该主题的炒作很快消失了。在使用北极冰作为饮用水方面几乎没有实质性进展。直到最近，整个事情似乎都被搁置了。

Entrepreneurs from South Africa and the United Arab Emirates have picked up the idea again. The research has demonstrated that this opportunity does hold potential for bringing water from the northern hemisphere where there is abundant water to those areas where they need. This is Mansur Kadir. He's lead scientist at the United Nations University in Montreal and author of the book Unconventional Water Resources. Frozen ice sheets in the Arctic store nearly 70 percent of all freshwater resources globally. Thousands of square kilometers of ice breaks off as ice bugs every year and melts into the ocean, freshwater that is wasted. And from a technological point of view, ice bugs are already told today. Ships from the oil and gas industry are pulling small chunks away from drilling platforms. But to provide a city like Cape Town with freshwater for roughly 10 weeks, we'd need something a lot bigger. An ice mountain weighing around 125 million tons. In comparison, a large cargo vessel weighs around 200,000 tons. And instead of pulling it just a few hundred meters, it would have to be dragged thousands of kilometers. It's a huge feat. But computer simulations from 2011 have shown that this is possible. Well, theoretically. They will come through this Antarctic ocean, which is very notorious in terms of its wealth to about 15 meters and at times the wind speed could be 130 kilometers per hour. So these are the two major challenges apart from all these economics and productivity and evaporation and water loss and the towing technology. It's still a long way from Fleshy 3D animation to reality.

来自南非和阿联酋的企业家再次吸取这个想法。研究表明，这个机会确实有潜力将北半球富含水资源的地区的水资源带到那些需要水的地区。这是曼苏尔·卡迪尔（Mansur Kadir）。他是联合国大学蒙特利尔分校的首席科学家，也是书籍《非常规水资源》的作者。北极的冰冻冰层储存着全球近70%的淡水资源。每年有数千平方公里的冰块从冰堆中断裂并融入海洋，造成水资源的浪费。从技术角度来看，现在就有技术可提取这些冰块。石油和天然气行业的船只正在从钻井平台上取下小块的冰。但是，想要为像开普敦这样的城市提供大约10周的淡水，我们需要一个巨大的冰山，重约125百万吨。相比之下，大型货船重约200,000吨。并且需要将其拖行数千公里，而不仅仅是几百米。这是一个巨大的壮举。但是，2011年的计算机模拟已经表明，理论上这是可能的。他们将通过这片非常臭名昭著的南极洋，深度达约15米，风速有时会达到130公里/小时。除了所有的经济学、生产力、蒸发和水损失以及拖船技术之外，这也是两个主要问题。距离从3D动画实现到现实还有很长的路要走。

An Emirati company, the National Advisor Bureau, has patented the technology to eventually pull it off. But they still like the funding to start a pilot phase. For now, the iceberg idea is proving too big a feat to solve today's problems.

一家阿拉伯联合酋长国公司——国家顾问局，已经申请了这项技术的专利，最终将实现这个想法。但他们仍需要资金来启动试点阶段。目前，冰山想法似乎对于解决当今的问题来说仍然是一个太大的挑战。

So let's look to something lighter, something that can be found pretty much everywhere, like air. You know how in the morning everything is covered with small droplets? Guess what these were before? Exactly. Clouds or fog? Humidity in the air becomes liquid when it cools down. That's why a cold glass of beer is wet on the outside even though no beer spilled over. In nature, this usually happens in the evening and at night when the temperatures drop. And it's possible to take advantage of this phenomenon and harvest this humidity.

因此，让我们看看轻松的事情，像可以几乎在任何地方找到的空气。你知道早晨万物都覆盖着小水滴吗？你觉得这些水滴是从哪里来的？是的。云或雾？当空气冷却下来时，空气中的湿度会变成液体。这就是为什么虽然啤酒没有溢出来，但冷啤酒杯子外面会湿的原因。在自然界中，这通常发生在晚间和夜间温度下降的时候。并且可以利用这种现象并收集这种湿度。

So fog harvesting has been practiced by indigenous people on virtually every continent. This is Rebecca Fano. She's a consultant and researcher at one of the most successful fog harvesting operations globally. You've got some kind of material. This one's nice and 3D, so it's got a lot of physical surface for the water to get stuck on. And then as fog passes through, it's just a cloud. You can kind of see the spray coming through in front of the other bigger net. And then it gets caught on this net.

各大洲上的土著人群已经开始了雾水收集的实践。 这是丽贝卡·法诺，她是全球最成功的雾水收集运营之一的顾问和研究员。 你们有一种类似材料的东西，这是一个很好的3D 网，因此水分子有很大的物理表面可以粘附。 雾气通过时，就像一团云一样，你可以从另一个更大的网的前面看到雾气喷涌出来，然后它就被这个网捕获了。

Put into practice, it looks like this. In the edge of the semi-arid, I'd-barm, rum region in Morocco, there's very little rain. But for six months, a thick fog hangs over the region. And this fog passes through 1,700 square meters of mesh, which makes it the largest fog harvesting operation in the world. The fog condenses and drips into large underground deposits from where it is distributed via pipes to people's homes. The nets collect around 35,000 liters of water every day, which fulfills the needs of more than 1,000 people and is even used to water crops. Today, there are big fog harvesting operations in Chile, Morocco, Ghana, Eritrea, Ethiopia and South Africa. But the potential is much bigger. There are suitable sites almost everywhere.

实践起来，它看起来大致如此。在摩洛哥的伊巴姆和隆地带半干旱地带的边缘，降雨量非常少。但是六个月的时间里，这个地区笼罩着浓雾。浓雾通过占地1,700平方米的网格穿过，它是世界上最大的雾水收集操作。雾气会凝结并滴入大型地下沉积物中，然后通过管道分配到人们的家中。这些网每天会收集约35,000升水，可以满足1,000多人的需求，甚至用于灌溉农作物。今天，在智利、摩洛哥、加纳、厄立特里亚、埃塞俄比亚和南非都有大规模的雾水收集操作。但潜力还很大，因为几乎到处都有适宜的场地。

A 40 square meter net that yields about 200 liters per day costs roughly $1,500. So the communities that would benefit the most from this particular technology are also those who are most marginalized within countries. So getting the attention there and the kind of startup capital where it needs to be is not pill battle. Although capital is needed, fog harvesting is fairly cheap, scalable and a great solution for people living in remote areas. But it's not an option for big cities. There's simply not enough fog and cities need more water than nets can catch.

这项技术能够每天产出大约200升的水，40平方米的净面积约为1500美元。因此，最需要这项技术帮助的是那些在国内最边缘化的社区。这也就意味着，在那里获得关注和创业资本并非易事。虽然需要资金支持，但雾水收集技术的成本相对较低、可扩展性强，为居住在偏远地区的人们提供了一个非常好的解决方案。然而，对于大城市来说，雾水收集并不是一个可行的选择。因为城市需要更多的水，而网上可以收集到的雾水并不足够。

Our last solution does not seem very crazy at first. But what's crazy is the amount of water we could save by implementing it. Leaking pipes are the reason we lose nearly 30 percent of all fresh water globally. That's a staggering 346 billion liters a day. To put that in perspective, that's 30 times more than German households consume per day or more than 2 billion bathtubs a year. Perfectly good water we could use to drink, wash, clean, grow food that's just being wasted. My son called me a planner from space so we are basically planners some of the times.

我们最后的解决方案一开始看起来并不是很疯狂。但是，让这个方案疯狂的是，如果实施它，我们可以节省多少水。漏水管道是我们全球损失近30%新鲜水的原因。这是惊人的3460亿升水每天。就算把它和德国家庭每天消耗的水量相比较，它也是其30倍以上，或每年达到20亿个浴缸以上。完好的水，我们可以用来饮用、洗涤、清洁、种植食物，现在正在被浪费掉。我的儿子说我是来自宇宙的规划师，所以说，我们有时也是规划师。

This is Lauren Guy. He co-founded the tech startup Astera. Plummers is a bit of an understatement. Astera tracks water leaks from space. They make satellite images with the help of microwaves. The microwaves are reflected differently depending on which medium they hit. From space we can get within the city underneath the ass-slide into the soil, into the pipes layer so our algorithms actually aim to drinking water. We can say from space if the water on this bottle for example came from the tap or from rain or from something else. They're looking for the composition of the water. If it's drinking water they assume it's a leak. And mostly they're right.

这是劳伦·盖伊。他是科技初创公司Astera的联合创始人。Plummers这个词有点轻描淡写了。Astera利用微波技术追踪水泄漏。他们通过卫星图像制作，微波技术在不同的介质上反射不同。从太空中我们可以得到城市地下的情况，穿过土壤，穿过管道层，所以我们的算法实际上是瞄准饮用水的。例如，我们可以从太空中判断这个瓶子里的水是来自自来水管还是雨水或其他来源。他们正在寻找水的组成成分。如果是饮用水，他们就会认为是泄漏。而且大多数情况下，他们都是正确的。

The results look like this. Every dot on this map for example is a leak. And here too a leak of over 120 litres per minute detected in Prato, Italy or in Bangkok or in Chinese cities. Astera sells those maps to utilities globally so they know where to fix leaks and save money. Astera says they have detected over 74,000 leaks worldwide. Leaks responsible for water losses of more than 2 billion litres per year. UK, Italy, the east coast of the US, Germany, those countries. We saw pipes, I saw personally a pipe made up of wood from 150 years ago that the only thing that keeps the pipe intact is the pressure within the pipe.

结果长这样。比如说，这张地图上的每个点都表示一个泄漏点，比如在意大利的普拉托，曼谷或中国城市中检测到的每分钟超过120升的泄漏。Astera将这些地图全球销售给公用事业公司，以便他们知道在哪里修复泄漏并节省费用。Astera表示他们已经在全球检测出超过74,000个泄漏点，这些泄漏负责每年超过20亿升的水损失。英国、意大利、美国东海岸、德国等国家都有。我们看到了管道，我亲自看到了一根150年前制成的木管，唯一让管道保持完整的是管道内部的压力。

Locating leaks is only the first step in a long process. Fixing one leak might create new ones because it can affect the pressure within the pipes. Proving and renewing pipes and infrastructure is key to saving water. And the nearly 40 billion dollars that are going down the drain globally here on here. In the US, fixing pipes is even cheaper than recycling water.

定位漏水只是一个漫长过程中的第一步。修补一个泄漏可能会引起新的泄漏，因为它会影响管道内的压力。验证和更新管道和基础设施是节水的关键。这可以节约全球流失的近400亿美元。在美国，修缮管道甚至比回收水更便宜。

So where does all this leave us? There are plenty of ways to improve access to water. Iceberg towing sounds fascinating but we are far off from implementing it and there are other methods that are much easier to put into practice today. We have a bag for harvesting that works in certain areas. It's a low-tech solution and quite cheap. But the biggest challenge is fixing our water infrastructure. This will be essential to stop wasting valuable clean water. We have the tools to do this. It's effective and just needs to be put into action.

那么，这些都给我们带来了什么呢？有很多方法可以改善获得水的途径。拖冰山听起来很吸引人，但我们距离实施它还很远，而且还有其他更容易实施的方法。我们有一种在某些地区运作良好的采收袋，这是一种低技术方案，相当廉价。但最大的挑战是修复我们的水基础设施。这将是阻止浪费宝贵清洁水的必要措施。我们有工具来做到这一点。它是有效的，只需要实施即可。

If you want to know how much fresh water your country weighs every year, check out the description below. I put a link for you there. And tell us what you think in the comments. And don't forget to subscribe, like and hit the bell. And give new videos for you every Friday.

如果你想知道你的国家每年有多少淡水，请看下面的描述，我已经在那里给你放了一个链接。在评论中告诉我们你的想法。别忘了订阅、点赞和点击通知铃铛。我们会在每个星期五为你提供新视频。