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Showing posts from January, 2023

005 What are the alternatives?

  ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfr82RB72U8 ) Yesterday, I came across a video on YouTube that talks about desalination. As I have been writing this blog about water and food issues in Africa over the term, this sparks my curiosity and makes me wonder why seawater desalination is not widely adopted to solve the continent’s water scarcity? Desalination is a process in which salt water is transformed into freshwater for human use. By pumping seawater into treatment plants, salt and other minerals are then filtered out from the water, making it suitable for irrigation, or even drinking (Micale et al. 2009) . The only requirement for desalination is supply of seawater and enormous amount of energy. With these two crucial elements, we can have a very reliable, and nearly unlimited supply of freshwater. Africa has a coastline of 30,500 km, and such method is suitable for coastal locations with easy access to seawater (Micale et al. 2009) . In 2018, Cape Town suffered an alarming wate...