Blue Gold, European Water Partnership Blog

With the launch of Blue Gold, the European Water Partnership (EWP) is creating a communication platform for the EWP, its members, the European water community, stakeholders and those interested in water at large.

Blue Gold is in important tool in achieving EWP's mission to be an action-oriented forum for all stakeholders including local, national and European governmental agencies, knowledge institutes, business, non-governmental organizations, public and private financial institutions, end-users and civil society groups. It constitutes a platform for exchanging views, finding solutions for water challenges in wider Europe and stimulating cooperation and partnerships.

Read more...

The water grad

Susan Berfield, writing in BusinessWeek
, describes the rush to control water supplies.

Roberts County is a neat square in a remote corner of the Texas Panhandle, a land of rolling hills, tall grass, oak trees, mesquite and cattle. It has a desolate beauty, a striking sparseness. The county encompasses 924 square miles and is home to fewer than 900 people. One of them is T. Boone Pickens, the oilman and corporate raider, who first bought some property here in 1971 to hunt quail. He’s now the largest landowner in the county: His Mesa Vista ranch sprawls across some 68,000 acres. Pickens has also bought up the rights to a considerable amount of water that lies below this part of the High Plains in a vast aquifer that came into existence millions of years ago.

If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property. ...

In the coming decades, as growing numbers of people live in urban areas and climate change makes some regions much more prone to drought, water — or what many are calling “blue gold” — will become an increasingly scarce resource. By 2030 nearly half of the world’s population will inhabit areas with severe water stress, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Pickens understands that. ... “The idea that water can be sold for private gain is still considered unconscionable by many,” says James M. Olson, one of America’s preeminent attorneys specializing in water- and land-use law. “But the scarcity of water and the extraordinary profits that can be made may overwhelm ordinary public sensibilities.”