Accounting aims to be complete but not double count. This can be a challenge for environmental water projects.

Embedded water, whether in food or commercial products, account for about 95% of an individual's water use. Give three examples of water embedded in common foods.

Water embedded in a product (such as beef) accounts for the water necessary to produce and process that product. It doesn't require that the water wasn't used by another process or flowed somewhere else.

Some food require a lot of water to produce, such as beef.

Water used and embedded in products can be discovered by using an LCA. For example, accounting for the water use in diapers depends on making the diaper and using or washing the diaper. Depending on the source of cotton or fiber for the diaper and the status of the watershed in which you live (renewable or mined), the water LCA for using diapers for 6 months can vary drammatically.

Give an example of the water used for 6 months for diapering. What is this per day?

Ecosystem processes can be restored to provide more water to communities.

Reforestation is a good example of how tree planting can lead to healther trees.

Water resource issues are closely tied to food security and power generation. The examples of water projects in Nicaragua demonstrate how these all go together, and are interwoven.

It is difficult to account for the benefits of a single intervention when the system has potentail positive feedback.

Examples:

• Describe the positive feedback between trees and rain in the Amazon Basin.
• Describe how positive feedback worked with trees in arid lands of the Niger.
• Describe how everything is related (food, water and forests) in the Cerro San Geronimo region of Nicaragua.

Appropriate scale technology:

• What do we mean by "appropriate scale technology" and give an example of a large scale and small scale solution that are each appropriate.
• Look at the Paul Polack page under the "Revolutionary Designs" tab and describe the four technologies that relate to water and agriculture. Why are these "revolutionary"?

What was so dangerous about Wangari Maathai if all she did was help women plant trees?

Video - Anupam Mishra

Another example of using multiple perspectives, which we are not studying directly in this course, is to learn from ancient practices, indiginous skills or traditional ecological knowledge to address current problems.

Examples of this is given in the TED talk on ancient ways of harvesting water. What can we learn from these attempts? Give an example of something that might be applied today.

Give an example of a large scale project that failed.

Analysis and Synthesis questions:
These are the type of manipulations you should be able to perform; parse out the parts of the question, remember or find concepts that are useful, and then put those together into a coherent answer.

Describe a positive feedback in the availability of water from the restoration of a watershed. List several, interconnected, benefits of a healthy watershed. Describe an accounting system (see the chapter) that would indicate if the project was beneficial. Why is the accounting process confounded by having multiple benefits and positive feedback recovery pattern?

Water use by people (not industry) is largely from embedded water. Compare this to the use by industry and agriculture (from last week).