Water Asset Management, LLC.

Isn’t it interesting that the Arab awakening began in Tunisia with a fruit vendor who was harassed by police for not having a permit to sell food — just at the moment when world food prices hit record highs? And that it began in Syria with farmers in the southern village of Dara’a, who were demanding the right to buy and sell land near the border, without having to get permission from corrupt security officials? And that it was spurred on in Yemen — the first country in the world expected to run out of water — by a list of grievances against an incompetent government, among the biggest of which was that top officials were digging water wells in their own backyards at a time when the government was supposed to be preventing such water wildcatting?

With a crucial water rights decision already pending, the Southern Nevada Water Authority is asking the state to let it increase by almost 80 percent the amount of groundwater it can draw from rural areas north of Las Vegas.

America’s drinking water systems face an annual shortfall of at least $11 billion to replace aging facilities that are near the end of their useful lives and to comply with existing and future federal water regulations. This does not account for growth in the demand for drinking water over the next 20 years. Leaking pipes lose an estimated 7 billion gallons of clean drinking water a day.

As water becomes more precious, suppliers are beginning to overcome public aversion to treating and reusing wastewater.

The reuse of municipal wastewater will be important to meeting future demand for freshwater in the United States, a new report from the National Academy of Sciences says.

Dependable water remains a mirage. The facts of the dispute are not comforting. Las Vegas needs a more diverse water supply. Last decade, Vegas’ population grew by more than a fifth, up to 584,000 in city limits (about 2 million in the area). Economic recession has slowed growth, but planners say they need a more stable water supply even to sustain the current population for the long term.

The city gets 90 percent of its water from the Colorado River reservoir of Lake Mead. But the source has proved unpredictable during a recent decade-long drought. The Colorado finally saw relief thanks to healthy precipitation and snowpack levels in 2011.

“We had one good year after 10 bad ones,” said SNWA spokesman J.C. Davis. “What if that was just intermission, and next year we start the second wave of a drought?”

If solar energy is eventually going to matter — that is, generate a significant portion of the nation’s electricity — the industry must overcome a major stumbling block, experts say: finding a way to store it for use when the sun isn’t shining.

That challenge seems to be creating an opening for a different form of power, solar thermal, which makes electricity by using the sun’s heat to boil water. The water can be used to heat salt that stores the energy until later, when the sun dips and households power up their appliances and air-conditioning at peak demand hours in the summer.

Jeff Sterba, President and CEO of American Water (NYSE: AWK), the largest publicly traded U.S. water and wastewater company, cited the American Society of Civil Engineers' newest report, Failure to Act: The Economic Impact of Current Investment Trends in Water and Wastewater Treatment Infrastructure as further evidence that public and private sectors must come together to address water challenges in the U.S.

The Texas Water Development Board's new plan says the state's population is expected to grow 82 percent by 2060, increasing water demand by 22 percent even as supply is expected to drop 10 percent.

Chicago Mayor Emanuel launches 10-year effort to replace 900 miles of century-old water pipe, a water-main-modernization that he promised would be the largest public-works initiative by any city in the country.

The state of water and wastewater infrastructure in the United States is a much discussed and lamented topic these days. With funding needs estimated in the ballpark of $600 billion over the next 20 years, coupled with the economic downturn and reduced federal funding, the task of repairing our aging infrastructure seems daunting if not insurmountable.

From the cotton field in rural India to the local rag bin, a typical pair of blue jeans consumes 919 gallons of water during its life cycle, Levi Strauss & Company says, or enough to fill about 15 spa-size bathtubs. It fears that water shortages caused by climate change may jeopardize the company’s very existence in the coming decades by making cotton too expensive or scarce.

Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala (Harvard MBA ’87) helped to transform Manila’s rundown metropolitan water system from an inefficient public utility into a model public-private partnership

Three generations of Al Kalin’s family have worked their 2,000 acres of carrots and sugar beets, wheat and alfalfa for almost a century in the Imperial Valley, a scorching swath of Southern California desert that was unfit for farming until water from the Colorado River was diverted here in 1901.

But now Mr. Kalin and his brother can continue to farm their land, or they can stop farming some of it and earn more than $500 an acre -- more than the market value of a crop like alfalfa -- simply by not using the water needed to nourish those crops. Water saved is sent on to thirsty cities and suburbs to the west: San Diego, Los Angeles and Palm Springs.

The Chinese government hopes to become a force in yet another environment-related industry: supplying the world with desalinated water.

There are large-scale desalination projects centralized all up and down the east coast of China,” ERI’s chief executive officer, Thomas S. Rooney Jr., said in an interview. “Our company has the most advanced technology in the entire desalination industry. And one of the beautiful things about China is that they like to adopt the most advanced technologies.”

“You can either fight them or join them, and our philosophy is that China likely is going to be the next big desalination market,” he added. “I would rather develop technology for China in China and take a more open approach than play the secrets game.

This report estimates the economic and job creation impact of a major investment in water infrastructure in the U.S. An investment of $188.4 billion --is the amount necessary, as estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency, to manage stormwater and preserve water quality. The $188.4 billion investment, spread equally over the next five years, would generate $265.6 billion in economic activity and create close to 1.9 million direct and indirect jobs and result in 568,000 additional jobs from increased spending.

The report analyzes the nature and scale of the global water challenge and proposes solutions to close the demand/supply gap. It ranks the solutions on the basis of cost, and produces a "water cost curve," that can be used by policy makers as well as investors, to arrive at low-cost solutions to water security. In-depth studies were conducted in four countries/regions facing challenges in the water sector - China, India, South Africa and Brazil - and in each country, the potential measures to close the gap between demand and supply was evaluated.

Special Report. This paper discusses the impact of water resources in every type of power plant and describes the different aspects of the water-energy nexus.

The 72 year-old, financial analyst Jeremy Grantham, has been noticed for what some call economic doomsday predictions, typically in open letters to investors. He argues that the late-18th-century doomsayer Thomas Malthus was pretty much right but just had bad timing with his predictions about unsustainable population growth on the eve of the hydrocarbon-fueled Industrial Revolution. Grantham is saying the same thing that both economists and scientists have been saying for decades and basically reaching the same conclusions, with updated numbers.

Grantham asserts that this already overpopulated world will vie increasingly for scarce resources over the next century. Further, capitalism, he says, is ill-equipped to deal with its impact on the earth. The contest over the world’s commodities is just beginning, Grantham says, and a Malthusian, run-out-of-resources economics could eventually take hold.

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