U.S. Water News Online
GENEVA -- Building more dams will do little to solve water shortages in large areas of Europe and could even reduce the continent's scarce remaining resources, a Switzerland-based conservation group said.
Authorities across the continent are suggesting creating more reservoirs to boost supplies during future droughts, but this is a wrong move because they lose large amounts of water through surface evaporation, said the World Wide Fund for Nature.
"We have to find better solutions for long-term water supply within Europe before our rivers turn to trickles," said Ute Collier, an expert on water supply at WWF. "Europe is not suffering from a shortage of dams or reservoirs, it's suffering from a waste of water."
Large parts of Southern Europe as well as Britain are suffering from severe shortages for the second time in two years after persistent hot weather followed months of low rainfall.
In particular, Britain, Portugal and Spain are all considering building more dams as a long-term measure to relieve future droughts, WWF said.
"With Europe in the grips of another sizzling summer, authorities need to convert plans for dams and reservoirs into plans for improving water efficiency and restoring wetlands and fragmented rivers," Collier said.
Authorities have already urged consumers to cut back on water usage. London mayor Ken Livingstone has even told Londoners to flush their toilets less often.
But rather than increasing the number of storage reservoirs, authorities should cut down on water wastage as large volumes are lost through inefficient irrigation of farm land and leakage from pipes supplying big cities, Collier said.
"This problem isn't going away as climate change is likely to increase the occurrence of droughts in Europe and elsewhere," she added. "No matter how many more (dams) you are going to build, it just seems crazy when you don't actually address those big inefficiencies."
The destruction of wetlands is also adding to the crisis, as they hold water like sponges and cannot be replicated by manmade storage facilities, WWF said.
Supplies are particularly low in England, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. In Italy, the River Po is drying up while Spain's reservoir levels are down by an average of 40 percent from last year, WWF said.
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