Water

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33853299

Dirty" or "extremely dirty": these are the classifications of 46% of the world's aquatic environments. This conclusion comes from a study that compiled and systematized data from 6,049 records of waste contamination in aquatic environments on all continents over the last decade.

“We have been occupying the U.S. company Cargill for 14 days, and now we have blocked access to Santarém’s airport, where many people come to take photos and swim in the river without knowing about the problems we are facing. The president signed a decree that privatizes three rivers – the Tapajós, Tocantins, and Madeira – and advanced a measure that opens the way for dredging the Tapajós. Our river is at risk. The government can no longer tell Europe and the United States that it preserves the environment while destroying it here,” said Goldman Prize winner Alessandra Korap Munduruku, a leader from the Middle Tapajós region.

During Wednesday’s meeting with government representatives, Chief Gilson Tupinambá announced the blockade of access to the airport in response to the lack of effective government steps to address the movement’s demands. “I want to tell all of you that no one is leaving Santarém, the airport has just been closed. No one is leaving Santarém. And you are going to stay here with us, eat what we eat, go through what we go through, until we get an answer,” he said.

“We went to COP30 and it was a staged circus. There, they promised Free, Prior, and Informed Consultation, but now we don’t want consultation, we want this decree revoked. Revoke it now. I’m 50 years old and my concern is for our children and grandchildren. What will be left because of greed?” said Chief Gilson Tupinambá.

“What is happening on the Tapajós is not an isolated episode: it is the direct consequence of decisions that treat rivers as export corridors and push projects forward without real listening and without rights safeguards. During COP30, more than 500 Indigenous people warned the world about the risks of projects tied to the Ferrogrão export corridor and the dredging of the Tapajós – and still, their demands remain without an effective response. The international community, buyers, and financiers cannot keep normalizing a ‘progress’ that fuels conflict and threatens living territories,” said Vivi Borari, an Indigenous leader and activist in the Tapajós Vivo Movement, a member organization of the Enough Soy Alliance.

“While Cargill tells the press that they have no control over the reckless expansion of export-oriented infrastructure across the Amazon, the opposite is true,” said Christian Poirier, Amazon Watch Program Director. “It is the demands of powerful commodity traders like Cargill that drive the destructive privatization of Amazonian rivers and construction of mega-projects like Ferrogrão. The Indigenous mobilization chose Cargill’s grain terminal for this reason, to hold them accountable alongside sectors of the Brazilian government.”

Crossposted from https://lemmy.ca/post/59767333

Lake Mead is two-thirds empty. Lake Powell is even emptier.

Not for the first time, the seven Western states that rely on the Colorado River are fighting over how to keep these reservoirs from crashing — an event that could spur water shortages from Denver to Las Vegas to Los Angeles.

The tens of millions of people who rely on the Colorado River have weathered such crises before, even amid a stubborn quarter-century megadrought fueled by climate change. The states have always struck deals to use less water, overcoming their political differences to avert “dead pool” at Mead and Powell, meaning that water could no longer flow downstream.

This time, a deal may not be possible. And it’s clear who’s to blame.

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Long-term observations from the Negev Desert show that ecological degradation is often driven by the breakdown of natural water redistribution processes.

Research demonstrates that rebuilding simple, water-retaining structures can restore these functional networks, reverse desertification trends, and recover vital ecosystem services.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33295794

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24354375

Half the world’s 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 39 of these sitting in regions of “extremely high water stress”, new analysis and mapping has shown.

Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown.

Watershed Investigations and the Guardian mapped cities on to stressed catchments revealing that Beijing, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi are among those facing extreme stress, while London, Bangkok and Jakarta are classed as being highly stressed.

Separate analysis of Nasa satellite data, compiled by scientists at University College London, shows which of the largest 100 cities have been drying or getting wetter over two decades with places such as Chennai, Tehran and Zhengzhou showing strong drying trends and Tokyo, Lagos and Kampala showing strong wetting trends. All 100 cities and their trends can be viewed on a new interactive water security atlas.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33166281

Last week, Tunbridge Wells went without running water for days on end, for the second time this winter. Over the course of this decade, the town has suffered a run of outages and on-off supply, or what South East Water is pleased to call “resilience issues”.

One of the richest towns in one of the richest societies in human history shows the rest of us that even lavish private affluence cannot make up for the really important forms of public scarcity.

Charophytes are underwater plants that play a crucial role in the water quality and biodiversity of lakes; they stabilize the lake bed, produce oxygen, promote water clarity, and provide habitat for numerous aquatic organisms. In Europe, their abundance has declined sharply since the late 19th century.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6490767

Archived version

The state-run ISNA news agency reported on Sunday, January four, quoting the director general of Iran’s Water Information and Data Office, that the country’s water resources remain in a fragile condition due to the continuation of multi-year droughts.

According to Firouz Ghasemzadeh, the recent rainfall has had only temporary effects and is not capable of compensating for the accumulated deficit caused by several consecutive years of drought in Iran.

According to this report, precipitation in the current water year has increased by 11% compared to the long-term average and by 76% compared to last year.

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Nevertheless, the provinces of Tehran and Alborz have experienced the largest decline in rainfall, with a decrease of more than 70% compared to the long-term average.

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The reservoirs of dams in the provinces of Tehran, Isfahan, Razavi Khorasan, Qom, Zanjan, and Markazi are in unfavorable conditions, and the supply of drinking water in cities dependent on these sources faces limitations; therefore, water consumption management remains a serious necessity in the country.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32234877

• Hungary’s Great Hungarian Plain faces severe desertification as groundwater depletes and droughts intensify, threatening agriculture and prompting government action.
• Farmers dubbed “water guardians” redirect thermal spa water to artificially flood low-lying fields, re-creating natural flooding cycles disrupted by river channelization.
• Early results show improved groundwater levels and increased vegetation, offering a potential conservation model for other drought-stricken regions worldwide.

Shelton Tucker is part of a novel plan to deal with the waters that are increasingly encroaching on his neighborhood in Hampton, Virginia. Situated at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and afflicted by one of the fastest paces of sea-level rise in the U.S., Hampton has long battled flooding.

But while flood-prone coastal cities have historically defaulted to levees, pumps and miles of cement-covered storm drains, Hampton is leaning heavily on rain barrels, rain gardens, declogging creeks and fortifying shores with oyster reefs.

Hampton residents like Tucker have a part to play, too. The 67-year-old president of the Greater Aberdeen Community Coalition has a spot for a rain garden—a plot designed to collect and absorb stormwater runoff—prepared in the front yard of his father’s house. “I got it all bricked out,” Tucker said. “I just need to know the plants to put in it.”

Hampton’s rain gardens and oyster reefs are part of a flood-management strategy heavily influenced by the Netherlands, dubbed “Living With Water.” At its core is a change in mindset about how to approach a future increasingly defined by rising oceans, more intense rains and soggier ground.

Instead of fighting water, the thinking goes, let it in. Guide it to areas where it can flow and sit safely; enjoy it while it’s there. Restore natural systems that absorb, buffer and cleanse. Take steps big and small, public and private, since every little bit counts.

In practice, that means Hampton is trying to better handle large volumes of water, dotting flood-prone areas with plant-lined storage basins, inserting low weirs in rivers to slow the flow of excess water and raising some key streets that are likely to submerge regardless.

While some nearby coastal cities are proposing billion-dollar floodwalls and surge barriers, Hampton is looking at restoring marshes and “naturalizing” miles of rock-fortified shoreline with sand and marsh grasses.

At a coastal park a few blocks from Hampton City Hall, the city is building a sandy marsh over the rocks that currently line the shore, and experimenting with new types of protective sills—including 3D-printed concrete reefs seeded with oysters.

The changes mean incoming waves will be gently buffered, rather than reflected by hard surfaces as they are now, reducing flooding and erosion, said Olivia Askew, a Hampton city resilience officer.

The water “will rise and fall in the new marsh that we’re creating, which will soften the shoreline,” she said.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/collapse/p/1578842/the-worsening-geopolitics-of-water-in-the-middle-east

Countries across the Middle East are facing acute water shortages, owing to poor resource management, accelerating climate change, and regional power politics. In the absence of concerted diplomacy, water will soon be another flash point in a chronically unstable region.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/31561834

Shaving every tenth of a degree off whatever final thermometer number we end up at means a few more glaciers hanging on, diminished perhaps, but a glacier still, with room to grow.

Archived link of the article

A new study published in Nature Sustainability warns that India’s largest cities are slowly sinking. Using eight years of satellite radar data, researchers found that parts of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Bengaluru are subsiding due to groundwater extraction and soil compaction, a process where the ground compresses as water is drawn out from underground layers.

• Located on the coast of Sulawesi Island’s largest city, Makassar, Tallo ward endures high water stress and contamination of local sources with heavy metals and other pollutants.
• Water stress is a well-documented driver of gender-based violence around the world, with extensive correlation established by numerous research studies, and causation in many circumstances.
• In Makassar, women are commonly responsible for ensuring local households are supplied with water, which typically involves hauling more than two dozen plastic containers of water across town.
• In response to these challenges, a grassroots women-led organization has entered direct talks with local political leaders and the municipal water company in a bid to improve access to water for consumption and sanitation.

archived (Wayback Machine)

The situation in Tehran is the result of “a perfect storm of climate change and corruption,” says Michael Rubin, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.

The overuse did not just deplete underground reserves—it destroyed them, as the land compressed and sank irreversibly. One recent study found that Iran’s central plateau, where most of the country’s aquifers are located, is sinking by more than 35 centimeters each year.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30547655

Tehran is running out of water.

Rationing has begun in Iran’s capital city, with some of the approximately 10 million residents experiencing “nightly pressure cuts” between midnight and 5 a.m. The entire country is in an unprecedented drought, facing its driest — and hottest — autumn in nearly 60 years. Tehran has received no rain at all since the start of September, and no rainfall is expected for the foreseeable future.

The city depends on five major reservoirs for its water supply. One has dried up completely, with another below 8 percent capacity. The managing director of the Tehran Regional Water Authority told state media last week that the Karaj Dam has only two weeks of drinking water left. The drought extends beyond the city, too. The water reserves of Mashhad, the second largest city in the country, have dropped below 3 percent capacity, putting 4 million people at imminent risk.

But if nothing changes, Tehran may soon face Day Zero — or when a municipality can no longer supply drinking water to its residents and taps run dry. In October, President Masoud Pezeshkian claimed that Tehran could no longer serve as the country’s capital, citing the water crisis as a major factor.

”If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by late November, we’ll have to [formally] ration water,” Pezeshkian told Iranian state media on Thursday. “And if it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran.”