...One sign of Los Angeles’s earnestness is its success in - TopicsExpress



          

...One sign of Los Angeles’s earnestness is its success in conservation: The city now consumes less water than it did in 1970, while its population has grown by more than a third, to 3.9 million people from 2.8 million. Two projects — a nine-acre water-treating wetland constructed in a former bus maintenance yard and a water management plan devised for a flood-prone district of 80,000 people — won awards this year from the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure. The city itself won one of the first water sustainability awards given by the U.S. Water Alliance, in 2011. Los Angeles’s shift occurred out of necessity, after legal decisions in the 1990s forced it to give up some of its imported water. More and more cities now face water constraints. In the West, where most climate scientists expect droughts to lengthen and deepen, the techniques being introduced in Los Angeles ought to be viewed not just as smart choices, but as requirements. Though most projects will start too late to address the severe drought now plaguing much of the West, they show how to cope with future ones. Together, these projects will treat polluted and even sewage water, capture rainwater, store water in aquifers, and use (or reuse) all of it, often while mimicking or supporting natural processes. The area’s water administrators who, until recently, thought of watersheds as merely rural concerns now recognize that even in Los Angeles, all living things are linked by their common water course and that its proper management is essential to the administrators’ success....
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 16:45:10 +0000

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