Tag Archives: drinking water

World Water Day 2019

Today is World Water Day – a day to focus on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal of safe drinking water for all. Our reports explore challenges and opportunities for improving water safety and availability. All are free to download.

Drinking Water Distribution Systems: Assessing and Reducing Risks

Protecting and maintaining water distributions systems is crucial to ensuring high quality drinking water. Distribution systems — consisting of pipes, pumps, valves, storage tanks, reservoirs, meters, fittings, and other hydraulic appurtenances — …

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From Source Water to Drinking Water: Workshop Summary

The Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine was established in 1988 as a mechanism for bringing the various stakeholders together to discuss environmental health issues in a neutral setting. The …

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Review of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection Operations Support Tool for Water Supply

New York City’s water supply system is one of the oldest, largest, and most complex in the nation. It delivers more than 1.1 billion gallons of water each day from three upstate watersheds (Croton, Catskill, and Delaware) to meet the needs of …

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Water Reuse: Potential for Expanding the Nation’s Water Supply Through Reuse of Municipal Wastewater

Expanding water reuse–the use of treated wastewater for beneficial purposes including irrigation, industrial uses, and drinking water augmentation–could significantly increase the nation’s total available water resources. Water Reuse

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Challenges and Opportunities in the Hydrologic Sciences

New research opportunities to advance hydrologic sciences promise a better understanding of the role of water in the Earth system that could help improve human welfare and the health of the environment. Reaching this understanding will require …

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Pathways to Urban Sustainability: Challenges and Opportunities for the United States

Cities have experienced an unprecedented rate of growth in the last decade. More than half the world’s population lives in urban areas, with the U.S. percentage at 80 percent. Cities have captured more than 80 percent of the globe’s economic …

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Using Graywater and Stormwater to Enhance Local Water Supplies: An Assessment of Risks, Costs, and Benefits

Chronic and episodic water shortages are becoming common in many regions of the United States, and population growth in water-scarce regions further compounds the challenges. Increasingly, alternative water sources such as graywater-untreated …

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Desalination: A National Perspective

There has been an exponential increase in desalination capacity both globally and nationally since 1960, fueled in part by growing concern for local water scarcity and made possible to a great extent by a major federal investment for desalination …

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Understanding Water Reuse: Potential for Expanding the Nation’s Water Supply Through Reuse of Municipal Wastewater

In communities all around the world, water supplies are coming under increasing pressure as population growth, climate change, pollution, and changes in land use affect water quantity and quality. To address existing and anticipated water …

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Alternatives for Managing the Nation’s Complex Contaminated Groundwater Sites

Across the United States, thousands of hazardous waste sites are contaminated with chemicals that prevent the underlying groundwater from meeting drinking water standards. These include Superfund sites and other facilities that handle and dispose …

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Water and Sustainable Development: Opportunities for the Chemical Sciences: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable

Experts in the areas of water science and chemistry from the government, industry, and academic arenas discussed ways to maximize opportunities for these disciplines to work together to develop and apply simple technologies while addressing some of …

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Contaminated Water Supplies at Camp Lejeune: Assessing Potential Health Effects

In the early 1980s, two water-supply systems on the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina were found to be contaminated with the industrial solvents trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE). The water systems were supplied …

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Sharing Water: Making Decisions About Sustainable Water Management

Water: we need it every day, and use it in countless ways. As the world enters the second decade of the 21st century, the human community finds itself searching for new paradigms for water supply and management in response to expanding populations, sprawling development, climate change, and the limits of existing conventional supplies.

The following websites, video, and NAP reports present the issues and problems we face to make water available both now and in the future. Continue reading