As Water Crises Intensify, Cities Turn to Rainwater Harvesting
August 23, 2011 at 3:02 pm 1 comment
As more and more people move to cities, the demand for resources in urban centers increases. City governments have an important role to play in encouraging, promoting, and incentivizing resource, especially water, conservation among residents. GOOD magazine gives as nice summary of water conservation and rain harvesting efforts across the world:
As Water Crises Intensify, Cities Turn to Rain Harvesting
Despite being near the world’s greatest, and seemingly “endless”, source of fresh water, the City of Chicago has been promoting rain harvesting for a very long time, as can be seen in its historic rain barrel program and now the Chicago Sustainable Backyard Program. In the face of climate change, where we are expecting rain to fall more heavily over shorter periods of time but less frequently causing more dry spells in the summer, Chicago’s efforts to conserve fresh water and manage stormwater will be increasingly important.
After a summer like Chicago has had, too bad not everyone had a rain barrel in their backyard.
Entry filed under: Cistern, Rain Barrels, Rain Harvesting, Water Conservation. Tags: .
1. Mark (@MapsRus) | September 16, 2011 at 5:07 am
Here is a timely resource: http://www.save-the-rain.com
This tool will let you draw a box over your roof and figure out how much rain you could save based on mean annual precipitation. Very surprising outputs.