izentrop wrote:
Whether it is pumped in the river or in aquifers, what is the difference?
The difference, well, it's just that the resource in the tablecloths is far from infinite, we see it almost everywhere now...
The water tables recharge in winter, but there is always a phase shift of a few weeks/months between the rainfall and the level of the water tables.
They are generally at their highest at the end of winter when the rainfall tends to reduce and at their lowest at the end of autumn precisely when the rains begin to become more abundant.
There what they want to do is fill their basins, by pumping in the tablecloths therefore, when these are at their highest (when all the lights are green as they say in their propaganda) that is to say basically late winter/early spring.
Who says "at the highest" also means that the recharging period is over and that from this moment the level will at best stagnate but above all begin to fall.
They will therefore pump their summer consumption into the aquifers and accelerate the drop in its level.
Finally,
the quantity of water taken from the aquifers will be the same see they will allow themselves to get even more out of it than before.
The thing is that in the middle of summer, when the groundwater level will be at its lowest and usage restrictions will continue to be in force, they will continue to irrigate with this groundwater that they have monopolized at a time when no one was paying attention.
And in addition we can be almost certain that they will boast of not being the cause of the situation with a speech like "see it's not us, we don't pump in the groundwater anymore, we have our basins" story of take people for fools and paint green their agricultural practices unsuited to the climate situation.
I'm not against bedpans, I'm against the method of filling them, which openly takes people for idiots. But it will pass cream because 90% of people have no idea of the water cycle.
If they want to fill the reserves, they start by recovering the water from all the artificial surfaces: roofs, parking lots, etc... which it does not have time to infiltrate and just goes directly to the river. to magnify the increasingly frequent floods.
Or even, otherwise, well, they just have to recover the water from their drains laid at all costs for decades.
It would be doubly beneficial...
These drains are one more aberration, they capture underground water that was in the process of seeping into the groundwater to put it back on the surface, just to amplify the increasingly frequent floods. Every year there are thousands of kilometers of these agricultural drains, there are now even high-performance machines to do it with depth adjustment by GPS...
And with each episode of floods, these are more and more serious, but we continue, we put it on the back of climate change (which of course has a role in history) without really looking at where the flood comes from. water and putting it on the backs of car parks, forgetting to look at the millions of hectares of drained agricultural land which spit out their millions of cubic meters of muddy water which will not recharge the groundwater while it took the path.
So go for a walk in La Bauce during a period of heavy rain, along the fields, you'll see what I'm talking about...
Strange they don't talk about collecting and storing this drainage water... it would have a double beneficial effect (on floods and on drought)
But as I've already said, they don't want to make their basins for the environment, or to change their practices, they want to do that in order not to change anything and take people for what they are (idiots) by doing a good shot of green-washing.
Conventional agricultural practices have remained modeled on a 50-year-old model (during the installation of drainage, at the time it allowed a yield gain of 50% so they remained on this idea) which is not no longer adapted to the current situation. But very often, everything that is undertaken in this area, it has the sole purpose of continuing as before. There is never really any questioning.