Water is life. We need water for everything from drinking and bathing to growing crops, supporting livestock and fish farms, shipping goods, generating electricity, and simply relaxing and having fun. Yet climate change is producing profound changes in this precious commodity, threatening water availability, access, and even quality.
Scientists often use the term “climate change” instead of global warming. This is because as the Earth’s average temperature climbs, winds and ocean currents move heat around the globe in ways that can cool some areas, warm others, and change the amount of rain and snow falling. As a result, the climate changes differently in different areas.
Understanding the problem of fresh water scarcity begins by understanding the distribution of water on the planet. Approximately 98% of our water is salty and 2% fresh. Of the fresh water, almost 70% is snow and ice; 30% is groundwater, less than 0.5% is surface water (lakes, rivers, etc).
One effect of climate change is to increase the amount of water that the atmosphere can hold, which in turn can lead to increased, heavier rainfall when the air cools. Although more rainfall can add to fresh water resources, heavier rainfall, which saturates the ground leads to more rapid movement of water back to the oceans, reducing our ability to capture, store and use it.

Warmer air also means that snowfall is replaced by rainfall and evaporation rates tend to increase. Yet another impact of higher temperatures is the melting of inland glaciers. This will increase water supply to rivers and lakes in the short to medium term, but this will cease once these glaciers have melted. In the sub-tropics, climate change is likely to lead to reduced rainfall in what are already dry regions, like Haiti.
As a result, the water cycle intensifies and flooding and drought are more extreme globally.
These changes are having a profound impact on Haiti, widely recognized as the poorest of nations. It’s one more reason that Barco’s Nightingales Foundation is determined to bring clean water by building solar water wells to the people of Haiti. We have already built seven solar powered water wells, which serve approximately 25,000 villagers in the remote areas of Haiti, providing clean, fresh water on a daily basis.  But the need is still great, and many more areas need fresh water. This need will continue to grow as climate change impacts already frail ecosystems.
Please, help us continue to build solar wells for the people of Haiti so that they might have clean and safe drinking water. To learn more, visit our website.
~Michael and Frida Donner