What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti

What happens when we change our relationship to water? Can we stop trying to control water and just go with the flow? Erica Gies , environmental journalist, National Geographic Explorer, and author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge sits down with host Jay Famiglietti to discuss how the engineered control of water sometimes does more harm than good.  We also hear from N...

The Endhó Dam north of Mexico City has been called "the largest septic tank in the world" and "Mexico's toilet bowl". Once designed to solve water problems in the region, it now receives wastewater from local industry and Mexico City.    Arizona State University doctoral students Raquel Neri, in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, and Diego Pantaleón , in the School of...

What happens when science gets in the way of ambition, politics, and progress? With a look back at the historical figures and forces that led to the overallocation of the Colorado River, and the consequences that continue to play out today, John Fleck joins Jay Famiglietti on What About Water? Fleck is a Water Policy Researcher at the Utton Center, University of New Mexico and co-author with Eric...

Humans are burning through our fossil fuels, and we're burning through our groundwater at an alarming rate. But are the powers that be even listening?   On this episode, Dr. Upmanu Lall joins host Jay Famiglietti to discuss why we've reached an "all hands on deck" moment with our groundwater crisis. Lall and Famiglietti discuss (along with Dr. Bridget Scanlon ) before the President's Council of Ad...

The World Bank estimated in 2016 it would take $1.7 trillion USD to achieve universal access to clean water and sanitation by 2030. By other estimates that amount is now even higher.    Gary White is the CEO and Co-founder, along with Matt Damon, of Water.org and WaterEquity. The two also co-wrote the book The Worth of Water: Our Story of Chasing Solutions to the World's Greatest Challenge.   Whit...

What is the true price of water? Considering growth and climate, how do we address the gap between demand and supply? Could we achieve water security by moving it across borders to dry regions like the American Southwest? John Take , Chief Growth & Innovation Officer at Stantec, discusses importing water, desalination efforts, and whether no infrastructure is the best infrastructure. At the end of...

Freshwater is essential for life on Earth, but analysts at the World Bank say more often than not, there's either too little, too much, or the water is contaminated and polluted. We look at whether desalinating ocean water and piping it across the desert would really solve water scarcity, why some cities and towns keep flooding, and how much is too much, when it comes to pumping freshwater out of...

People in the lower Colorado River basin are now witnessing drastic cuts to their allotments. In many cases, developers find alternate sources of water by drilling into underground aquifers. But in places like Pinal County, Arizona, that groundwater is already becoming scarce. We hear from Stephen Q. Miller , who sits on both the Pinal County Board of Supervisors and the board for the Central Ariz...

The meat and dairy industries are some of the biggest water users in the American West, thanks to one of cows' favorite foods – alfalfa. As aridification continues across the American southwest, water is becoming far more scarce on the Colorado River. A critical source of water for roughly 40 million Americans, we look at why so much of the Colorado River's freshwater goes toward growing water-int...

When Autumn Peltier was eight, she learned the tap water on a neighbouring reserve wasn't safe to drink, or even to use for hand-washing. That injustice triggered her decade-long advocacy campaign for safe drinking water. She made headlines as a 12 year-old, admonishing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at an Assembly of First Nations event for the choices his government had made for her people.    In...

Can we really "tech" our way out of freshwater shortages, scarcity, and pollution? In our Season 4 finale, we're asking the big question of the season – will new water technology be enough to solve wicked water problems? Will Sarni joins Jay for a look back at the bright ideas and inventions we've heard about this year, sharing his view on technology's ability to solve problems around water qualit...

In this episode, we're going underground, undersea and into your water and sewer pipelines with science fiction's favorite problem-solvers…robots! Jay sits down with Vanessa Speight, a professor of Integrated Water Systems at the University of Sheffield, to learn how new, spider-like robots have the potential to locate and fix leaks in aging water pipes.    Jay and Vanessa discuss when we might ac...

On this episode of What About Water? an entrepreneur in Austin, Texas turns his dishwasher sensor into a tech startup that's feeding water utilities snapshots of their water quality in real time.   Jay sits down with Seyi Fabode, the CEO and co-founder of Varuna, to discuss how his company's cloud-based software is helping cities keep track of their drinking water quality by the minute, allowing t...

If it's not stuck in glaciers or polar ice, 99 per cent of the world's freshwater is groundwater. Water underground supplies nearly half of the world's drinking water. But what happens when dangerous chemicals and waste – polyfluoroalkyl substances ( PFAS), oil, gasoline and road salts – percolate down into that supply?    On this episode of What About Water? Jay sits down with the father of conta...

Call the fashion police! In this special holiday edition of What About Water? we dive into the apparel industry's dirty secret: its water use. Behind oil and gas, fashion is the single most polluting industry on the planet. It accounts for 8 per cent of all carbon emissions and 20 per cent of global wastewater. We start by catching up with shoppers at the Picker's Hullabaloo Flea Market in Charles...

How can we measure water when it disappears into thin air? On this episode of What About Water? we're looking at evapotranspiration, or "ET" for short. It's the combination of water evaporating from the soil, combined with the measure of water transpiring through crops' leaves. Accounting for this water loss helps farmers know exactly how much water they should apply across their fields, and new a...

In the quest to find clean, renewable sources of energy, we turn to a familiar method: hydroelectricity. Today, the ancient method of harnessing the power of flowing water is hitting enormous new heights. Hydroelectric dams are some of the biggest human-made structures in the world. As humans dam more and more rivers, the scale and sheer size of these structures continues to grow.   But in trying...

It's estimated that by 2050, we'll have over 9 billion people on earth. To feed everyone, we will need to produce 60 per cent more food - and we'll need to grow it using less water. On this episode of What About Water? we're looking at new technology that can make that shift possible. Jay sits down with colleague and friend Bruno Basso, an agro-ecosystem scientist at Michigan State University and...

By 2025, experts predict over half the world's population will live in water-stressed areas. With a number of our freshwater resources on land receding, is it time to look to the ocean - or, rather, underneath it for fresh water ? Jay sits down with Brandon Dugan, the Associate Department Head and Baker Hughes Chair in the Department of Geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines, to find out. Bran...

For Nik Kowsar, civil unrest in Iran is not new. As a geologist and journalist, he's been sounding the alarm about water shortages and censorship in his home country for decades. After being arrested and jailed for one of his cartoons and receiving death threats from pro-regime Islamists, Kowsar fled Iran in 2003. Today, he is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian journalist and water issues analyst....

Can water risk disclosure move the needle on corporate water stewardship? And what does that risk mean for our own retirement funds? In this very special episode of What About Water? - recorded on location at World Water Week - Jay sits down with Cate Lamb in Stockholm, Sweden to discuss valuing water. We hear how companies with high water-related risks affect our own bottom line, and how pensions...

In the first episode of our fourth season, Jay sits down with renowned scientist and IPCC author, Virginia Burkett, to talk about technology, its pitfalls and its promises for a water-secure future.   Burkett is the Chief Scientist for Climate and Land Use Change at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), where she's worked for over three decades. She is based in Louisiana and is an expert in global ch...

Our planet is in crisis. When it comes to water, there are many promising solutions. But i n a world full of new technologies, what innovations should we pay attention to? And will they be enough?   On Season 4 of What About Water? we're diving into New Technologies, Water Realities . Host Jay Famiglietti will sit down with the experts, innovators and big-picture thinkers who are helping preserve...

What happens when tensions over water reach their boiling point? In our final bonus episode of the summer season, we explore the causes of water conflicts and what we can do to stop them. We start with the Middle East, a water-scarce region where conflict brews over shared water resources. We then turn to Latin America, where migrants are spurred by climate change, and the lack of water rights in...

In our third bonus episode of the summer season, we look back at the innovative ways people are sourcing their freshwater, from building home water systems on the Navajo Nation to engineering a state of the art wastewater treatment facility in Orange County. We hear what improvements need to be made to America's aging water infrastructure. And we look at the damage that over-engineering has done t...