Harvested stormwater counters climate change, report says

Suzanne Bohan in the Contra Costa Times (California): Stormwater flowing off rain gutters, sidewalks and roadways may be the state's new liquid gold as Californians face shrinking water supplies due to rising temperatures, a new report asserts. "In Western states, there's been an increasing push to see this as a water supply resource," said Noah Garrison, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council who co-authored the report, "A Clear Blue Future," released last week.

Garrison teamed with UC Santa Barbara and University of Washington researchers to release this analysis of how rainwater capture or infiltration projects could make up for water shortages attributed to altered weather.

…For the areas studied — urbanized regions of Southern California and portions of the Bay Area — capturing more of this rainwater at residential and commercial sites could net more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year, enough to supply two-thirds of the water used annually by the city of Los Angeles. If government and industrial sites were added to the equation, the water savings projection for those regions alone would increase by another 75,000 acre-feet annually. Hundreds of thousands more acre-feet of water are likely available if the rest of the state is factored in, Garrison said....

Rain barrels, shot by Jan Tik, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.