That can be summed up if you look at the water footprint and this gives
you some indications of some of the things we can do to manage our use of water.
Different crops use different amounts of water.
So for instance, if we take rice which was in the previous picture,
then to produce 1 ton of rice,
we need to use 2,000 meters cubed of water to produce that ton of rice.
That can be compared with coffee, which needs to use
more than, almost ten times as much water or
potatoes and yams, which need to use about a tenth as much water as rice.
So you can see that by choosing a different crop type we can
strongly manage the amount of water that we can use.
There are also technological solutions to our water use.
If we look at irrigation, which was the biggest user of groundwater, we can
irrigate like this top picture, which is a traditional sprinkler type of irrigation.
Or we can do it smarter and
that need not be something that involves complicated technologies.
For instance, these bottom two slides of pictures on the slide
show drip irrigation systems which allow you to, in a very controlled way,
put the water on the crops and minimize the evaporative losses,
which are obviously very high in the top picture.
The other side of a groundwater supply which is very important is water quality.
And that's also linked to the agricultural issues that we presented before.