BLANTYRE, Malawi, March 29 — Twice a day, 25-year-old Harold Nkhoma checks a series of gauges at the government’s weather station here in Malawi’s second-biggest city.
He skips the barometer because its light doesn’t work and he can’t read the figures. He has waited six months for new batteries.
He ignores the evaporation pan designed to show how quickly water is absorbed into the soil. Peeled-off paint and missing wire mesh have left it useless. And he bypasses the glass sphere that measures the duration of sunshine by burning marks on paper strips. It has been out of paper for four years.
His supervisor, Werani Chilenga, is disgusted. Broken equipment, outmoded technology, slipshod data and a sparse scattering of weather stations are all that his national agency can manage on a $160,000 budget.
“We cannot even know the duration of sunshine in our country for four years, so how can we measure climate change?” said Mr. Chilenga, a meteorological engineer. “Oh, oh, it is pathetic!”
The lack of meteorological data is just one challenge as Malawi struggles to cope with global warming. Add to that a lack of irrigation; overdependence on a single crop, maize; shrinking fish stocks; vanishing forests; and land degradation.
Last March, Malawi, which has a population of 14 million people and is one of the world’s poorest countries, identified $23 million worth of urgent measures it should take in the next three years. It delivered them to the United Nations program that helps poor nations deal with climate change.
A year later, the government is still negotiating with donors. “It is sad that up until now we have not gotten the monies that have been talked about,” said Henry Chimunthu Banda, the minister of environmental affairs. That is not to say Malawi is standing still. The government is moving toward bigger grain reserves, changes in agricultural practices and construction of a new dam. Nine out of 10 Malawians are subsistence farmers.
Austin Kampen, 39, is an early adapter. A nonprofit group last year gave him hoses and a huge bucket — a rudimentary but effective crop sprinkler system.
He plants a variety of maize more likely to survive shorter growing seasons and backs it up with cotton, vegetables, potatoes and cassava.
He still lost his entire harvest in January when the river overflowed after a week of nonstop rain, submerging his seven-acre field and leaving 75 of his neighbors homeless. Still, he said, he will manage to plant anew this season.
Another farmer, Jessie Kaunde, also aims for resilience. But her bravest effort failed.
Armed with a $68 loan, she dug two fish ponds in 1999 behind her house north of Blantyre. Since drought struck three years ago, they are nothing but giant grassy pits.
“I am really disappointed,” she said.
One reason is that other farmers have planted by the river that fed her ponds, causing the riverbanks to cave in and disrupt the water flow. Such planting is illegal but enforcement is weak, said Everhart Nangoma, an environmental specialist formerly with CURE, a nonprofit group focusing partly on climate change.
“Malawi is getting ready, but we are not there,” Mr. Nangoma said. “We are not ready at all.” - SHARON LAFRANIERE
Prone to Drought, but Moving Ahead on Desalination
PERTH, Australia, March 27 — Looking out over a sparkling blue bay on Australia’s west coast, Gary Crisp, an alchemist for the new century, saw an ocean of drinking water.
Behind him was an industrial park filled with tanks, pipes, screens, filters and chemicals for converting seawater into drinking water — 17 percent of the water supply for this city of 1.5 million people.
As the world warms and clean water becomes a prized commodity, the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant is using the renewable resources of wind and ocean to produce it, along with a finite resource that is less available in many other countries: money.
The $313 million plant, among the largest in world (behind giant plants in Israel and the United Arab Emirates), opened in November and is already running at capacity, producing up to 38 million gallons of water a day, nearly enough to fill 100 Olympic-size swimming pools.
The seawater is sucked into the plant through a pipeline whose mouth is 200 yards offshore. Once inside, it is filtered through fine membranes in a complex process called reverse osmosis.
About half the water is purified and sent into the city water system to mingle with water from other sources. The salt remains in the other half, which is flushed back out to the ocean.
The plant is one of the newest in a rapid spread of desalination plants in countries that can afford them. Though the plants are expensive to build, water from them costs only $3.50 per 1,000 gallons. They are commonplace in the Middle East, where oil pays for water, and Southern California is home to many smaller plants. What sets the Perth plant apart is not only its size but its engine — wind power.
The plant is driven by power from 48 turbines in the Emu Downs Wind Farm, about 100 miles to the north, that can produce 80 megawatts of electricity a day, more than three times the needs of the plant. That avoids the trade-off at most desalination plants, which are powered by fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases.
“We call it alchemy — converting wind to water,” said Mr. Crisp, the Perth plant’s principal desalination engineer.
The treated water offers people here in the world’s most arid continent “security through diversity,” in the local phrase, complementing dams, aquifers and recycling. Water conservation could be a powerful tool, but few politicians dare to suggest any measures more aggressive than limiting the use of lawn sprinklers — a privation Perth’s plant is helping to avoid.
Half the water used domestically in Perth goes to gardens, Mr. Crisp said; of the water used indoors, 30 percent goes into washing machines. Affluent suburbs use twice as much water as the city proper, he said.
Australia is suffering some of the worst droughts in its recorded history. Stream flows into dams in Perth have shrunk by two-thirds in the last 30 years, even as its population swells by more than 20,000 people a year.
Perth is talking about building one or two more plants in the coming years, and similar plants are in the early stages of development in Sydney and the town of Tugun in Queensland.
Having proved itself, the plant will have its official opening next month. Standing by the sparkling blue bay, people will be invited to drink from small plastic bottles bearing labels that read, “Limited edition desalinated water from the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant.” - SETH MYDANS
