A student at Australia’s Swinburne University last week received the James Dyson Award for a device he says is capable of harvesting moisture from the air for use in irrigation, even in the world’s driest places.

Developed by Edward Linnacre, the Airdrop is a wind- or solar-powered device that sucks air underground (more…)

International drink and snack giant PepsiCo has vowed to cut the carbon emissions and water consumption of its UK operations by 50 percent in five years. PepsiCo, which is the parent company of Britain’s biggest-selling brand of potato chips, says it will switch to potatoes that require less water and are grown using more efficient methods of irrigation. Through these improvements, (more…)

A pair of satellites that measures changes in the earth’s gravity has shown that the intense irrigation of a 1,200-mile swath of northern India is depleting groundwater at a rate of 1.5 to 4 inches per year.

The satellites, part of a joint U.S.-German mission known as GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), show that the region — inhabited by 600 million people heavily dependent on irrigated agriculture — is withdrawing 13 cubic miles of water per year from underground aquifers.

Reporting in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, U.S. and Indian scientists analyzed satellite data from 2002 to 2008 and concluded that Indian farmers are pumping out groundwater 70 percent faster than estimated by the Central Ground Water Board of India in the 1990s.

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