En stadig voldsommere skiften mellem oversvømmelser og tørke har fået landsbyer til at søge nye veje til klimasikker vandforsyning – og hvad er mere naturligt end at bruge solen selv.
KRATIE, 14 August 2012 (IRIN): Floods and droughts are two leading causes of agricultural losses in Cambodia, where farmers have begun using solar power to manage their water supply and counter the impact of increasingly erratic weather patterns.
In the disaster-prone (udsatte) Bosleav (also known as Bos Leav) commune in Kratie Province – some 480 km northeast of the capital, Phnom Penh – the South East asian country’s first solar-powered water pumping station was recently completed.
The solar-powered pumps push water into storage tanks and then gravity (tyngdekraften) takes over to distribute the water to households, said Dara R.M. Ung, a project advisor at the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF).
Some 140 km of the Mekong River, where 70 percent of residents live along the banks, runs through Kratie Province, which has been ranked as one of the country’s most disaster-prone provinces.
The ministry is carrying out the project as part of its National Adaptation Programme for Action (NAPA) to help farmers adjust to extreme weather.
“Having access to water allows me to cook more foods than before [and] spend more time with my children,” said Sophorn Chay, 33, a mother of four, as she tasted her first tap water delivered by the solar pump. Until recently she spent about 2,5 hours each day in search of water.
The commune has 1.573 families but only 150 were selected to join a community water association, a requirement for being connected to the network supplied by the solar-powered pump, and Chay’s family is one of them.
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http://www.irinnews.org/Report/96102/CAMBODIA-Water-management-goes-solar
