Water

Research on one of the world’s most climate-exposed deltas offers important lessons for vulnerable coastal regions around the world

As sea levels climb and weather grows more extreme, coastal regions everywhere are facing a creeping threat: salt.

The study: Sea-level rise drives changes in salinisation patterns in low-lying Bangladesh

In a remote corner of North America, salmon and mining companies are vying for new territory.

The Tulsequah Glacier meanders down a broad valley in northwest British Columbia, 7 miles from the Alaska border. At the foot of the glacier sits a silty, gray lake, a reservoir of glacial runoff. The lake is vast, deeper than Seattle’s Space Needle is tall. But it didn’t exist a few decades ago, before 2 miles of ice had melted.

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The aquifer under Fish Lake Valley feeding the groundwater-dependent ecosystem is heavily over-appropriated, meaning more water is taken out of it than goes into it each year. One acre foot of water is the equivalent to 325,850 gallons, or enough to supply two to three homes for a year, and the basin has a perennial yield of just 30,000 acre feet, according to state documents. But more than that is pumped out each year, and even more water is allocated on paper than what is currently taken.

The basin’s over-appropriation is somewhere between 150 to 250 percent. The aquifer’s water level has dropped two feet a year, the overuse drawing it down 75 feet since the 1960s.

Nearly all of that groundwater has gone to agriculture in the region, most of which is used to grow alfalfa, the water-intensive crop that primarily feeds cattle in the beef and dairy industries.

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With Colorado River negotiations facing a 2026 deadline, the state wants to keep water management in its own hands, but lags its neighbors in planning to cut usage.

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As climate change fuels increasingly erratic weather, scientists need a better read on snowpack temperature to understand when water will reach reservoirs—and when it threatens to flood them.

Archived copies of the article:

• archive.today
• ghostarchive.org
• web.archive.org

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Antibiotics, antidepressants and other drugs frequently leach into the environment, where they can impact ecosystems and human health.

A new modeling study estimates that every year, thousands of tons of the most-used antibiotics are released into the world’s rivers from human consumption alone—and 11 percent of them reach the world’s oceans or inland sinks. Researchers have also discovered widespread contamination of aquatic ecosystems with antidepressants, heart medications and other drugs in recent years.

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• The Madeira River, the largest tributary of the Amazon, has been losing water flow over the last 20 years while facing severe droughts.

• The water drop is worrying the local population, whose livelihoods depend on balanced water bodies for small-scale agriculture, wild fruit extractives, fishing and transportation.

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As government regulators focused on reigning in air pollution, companies were busy generating new sources of pollution, including plastics and PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals. PFAS, which stands for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a large group of compounds used, among other things, to make fabric stain-resistant and pans nonstick.

Over time, these modern-era substances — which famously take decades to millennia to degrade — have leached into the environment, reaching every corner of the planet, no matter how tall or deep. Microplastics, PFAS, and some other compounds, such as pesticides, are now so widespread that they’ve essentially become part of our biome, not unlike bacteria or fungi.

They’re so common, in fact, that they’re even found in the rain.

A number of studies, for example, have documented microplastics in rain falling all over the world — even in remote, unpopulated regions. For one 2020 analysis in the journal Science, researchers documented microplastics in rainwater that fell on several national parks and wilderness areas in the Western US. Most of the plastic bits were microfibers, such as those shed from polyester sweaters or carpeting on the floor of a car. The researchers estimated that more than 1,000 metric tons of plastic from the atmosphere fall on parks in the West each year, including both as rainfall and as dry dust. That’s equivalent to roughly 120 to 300 million plastic water bottles, according to the study.

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The suspension of a 1960 treaty between India and Pakistan has huge ramifications.

Snowfall in Asia's Hindu Kush-Himalayan mountain range has reached a 23-year low, threatening nearly two billion people dependent on snowmelt for water, scientists warned in a report on Monday.

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The sector, which had been set a target to reduce spillages by 40%, needs ‘radical reform’, campaigners say

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20721323

A Cornell-led collaboration has hit the trifecta of sustainability technology: The group developed a low-cost method to produce carbon-free "green" hydrogen via solar-powered electrolysis of seawater. A happy byproduct of the process? Potable water.

If you were to drink improperly recycled toilet water, it could really hurt you — but probably not in the way you’re thinking. Advanced purification technology so thoroughly cleans wastewater of feces and other contaminants that it also strips out natural minerals, which the treatment facility then has to add back in. If it didn’t, that purified water would imperil you by sucking those minerals out of your body as it moves through your internal plumbing.

So if it’s perfectly safe to consume recycled toilet water, why aren’t Americans living in parched western states drinking more of it?

A new report from researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Natural Resources Defense Council finds that seven western states that rely on the Colorado River are on average recycling just a quarter of their water, even as they fight each other and Indigenous tribes for access to the river amid worsening droughts. Populations are also booming in the Southwest, meaning there’s less water for more people.

The report finds that states are recycling wildly different proportions of their water. On the high end, Nevada reuses 85 percent, followed by Arizona at 52 percent. But other states lag far behind, including California (22 percent) and New Mexico (18 percent), with Colorado and Wyoming at less than 4 percent and Utah recycling next to nothing.

The report found that if the states other than high-achieving Nevada and Arizona increased their wastewater reuse to 50 percent, they’d boost water availability by 1.3 million acre-feet every year. Experts think that it’s not a question of whether states need to reuse more toilet water but how quickly they can build the infrastructure as droughts worsen and populations swell.

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In Orange County, California, wastewater from people’s homes is not considered waste. Instead of treating it and sending it to the ocean, Orange County purifies its wastewater with an additional three-step process. Each day, the county treats about 130 million gallons until it’s safe enough to drink.

Mehul Patel is with the Orange County Water District. He says the aquifer is a key source of water for people who live in the area. Replenishing it this way helps buffer water supplies as climate change makes droughts more frequent and severe.

Orange County has now been recycling its wastewater for more than a decade. And Patel says the approach could help other drought-prone regions, too.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20595083

• The involvement of Munduruku people in illegal mining inside the Munduruku Indigenous Territory made Brazil’s efforts to stop it more complicated, federal officials said.
• Munduruku sources told Mongabay that deception, abandonment by the state and a lack of alternative income sources are what push some Munduruku people to mine.
• The recruitment of Indigenous peoples is an important mechanism used by miners to secure access to lands and gain support against government crackdowns, researchers said.
• Sources said the government should invest in public policies and alternative income projects to strengthen food security, improve health and the sustainable development of communities.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20588797

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20537638

In a drought-hit Mexican border region at the center of growing competition with the United States for water, conservationists are working to bring a once-dying river delta back to life.

peer-reviewed meta analysis: Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers by J. Poore, T. Nemecek et al.

no-paywall upload by Poore on his website

processed data visualized well on OurWorldInData