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COSTING THE EARTH
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PROGRAMME INFO |
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Costing the Earth tells stories which touch all our lives, looking at man's effect on the environment and at how the environment reacts. It questions accepted truths, challenges the people in charge and reports on progress towards improving the world we live in. |
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LISTEN AGAIN Ìý30 min |
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PRESENTER |
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'Costing the Earth confronts accepted views on the environment. I think the programme consistently manages to get the real story and tell it in a way that makes people care.'
Miriam O'Reilly
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PROGRAMME DETAILS |
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The Essex Desert
Essex is a desert.Ìý That's not an apocalyptic vision of a globally-warmed future, it's just a look at the annual average rainfall figures for the UK.
This week's 'Costing the Earth' looks beyond Britain's image as grey and rain-sodden and gets to grips with reality.Ìý London has less rainfall than Istanbul and Madrid and it's getting drier at an astonishing rate.
The water supplies of South-East England are already stretched to breaking point every summer so what happens when climate change brings drier winters and hotter summers?Ìý Where is the water to come from to supply the million new homes that John Prescott has promised for the South-East?
Stephen Halliday, author of
'Water- A Turbulent History' has some suggestions. Why not reverse our rivers so they no longer dump fresh water into the sea?Ìý Why not fill the canal system with water from the rain-sodden north of England and funnel it to the parched south?
Thames Water,Ìý London's major water company,Ìý believes it may have a simpler plan.Ìý They will make use of the largest water source on earth- the sea.Ìý Plans are well advanced forÌýa £200m de-salination plant at Barking which will take water from the Thames Estuary, squeeze out the salt and pipe it to 900,000 east-enders.Ìý But this technology, Ìýcommonly used by the oil-rich states of the Middle East, has its problems. ÌýIt requires hugeÌýquantities of energy,Ìý it may have an impact on the estuary's eco-system and it's certainlyÌýgoing to be expensive. ÌýWill umbrella-toting Londoners be willing to pay more to drink seawater?
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Next week Alex Kirby visits Boscastle in Cornwall to ask if we can improve our forecasting of extreme weather events.
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