1/2/2024 0 Comments East palo alto smallandWhy that should be so is a vexing question that dates back centuries. Everyone knows the market price of bread bought and sold each day, but none the value of water embedded within each loaf.Īmong resources, water alone is not bought and sold outside customary, rural or grey markets. Global brokers flourish on global grain and livestock commerce, blind to the reservoirs of virtual water it took to produce each commodity. One indication that the novel approach remains on the periphery: water market trading lacks its own IWA specialist group. And the unserved millions in the slums around megacities have spontaneously brought trucks and tankers to trade water in the shadows of back alleys.īut trading between cities is certainly novel and even with the traditional reference points mentioned above, water markets have long struggled to enjoy formal, institutional legitimacy. Arid regions from Australia to Chile to Arizona allowed farmers to engage in handshake transactions among upstream/downstream irrigators. Customary exchanges anchored Arabian aflaj, Persian qanat, Balinese sobek, or Moroccan khettara. Water markets have emerged over time and around the world to shape the local economies of traditional cultures. Trading water as a concept is hardly new. Increasingly dry, and financially strapped as a result, East Palo Alto needed a radical solution and in May 2017, it signed a ground-breaking deal to buy the water it needed from the neighbouring city of Mountain View.Ī second deal with Palo Alto signed earlier this year has also transferred urban water rights to E.P.A, and for cities sharing East Palo Alto’s predicament, trading with other municipalities may offer a new way to relieve a damaging water shortage. The state had just passed a strict groundwater law that put a restrictive ceiling on well pumping, environmentalists had campaigned aggressively against desalination plants, and energy expenses were making treatment prohibitively costly. Even if repaired, climate change meant reduced snowpack and tapering runoff left even less surface supply that could be stored. Old dams were leaking, in some cases failing. Worse, formerly reliable sources had begun, literally, to dry up. simply couldn’t guarantee access to supplies. In July 2016 the city had to prohibit “new or expanded water connections” as E.P.A. Long an economic laggard, bypassed during the dotcom boom of 2000, East Palo Alto’s ethnically diverse population of 30,000 had subsequently gained new life with the arrival of Facebook and other Silicon Valley powerhouses, with new schools, affordable housing, and high profile projects in the works. In June 2016, the northern California city of East Palo Alto (E.P.A.) faced a desperate situation, one it shares with an estimated half of all urban areas worldwide. Why city utilities are turning to new ‘tools of the trade’ to secure future flows East Palo Alto shares the Tuolumne River with over 20 municipalities (Credit: )
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