Water warnings issued

One of life’s most precious resources, water, is in danger of becoming ever more scarce and ever more polluted in the Canary Islands.
This warning came last month from green group Ben Magec-Ecologistas en Acción who are trying to highlight the serious deterioration in the archipelago’s aquifers, most especially in the most densely populated islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria.

This deterioration, coupled with the total abandonment of traditional systems of collecting water, is placing the Canaries in an extremely precarious situation, for future management of this vital resource, say the greens.
Climate change will bring increases in temperatures with summers getting hotter, and a corresponding decrease in rainfall and an increase in evaporation, especially through plants. Not only will it rain less, they say, more of what does fall will be lost through the process of evaporation.
And calls on water in the future longer hotter summers will be all the greater, from the resident population, from the floating tourist population and tourist-related infrastructure like pools and golf courses, and last but not least, from farmers needing more water for their crops.

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Where China's Rivers Run Dry

The view from the top of the luxurious Morgan Centre (which will soon host a seven-star hotel) down onto Beijing's Olympic Green, where the 2008 Summer Games will begin in less than 500 days, is breathtaking. There, far below, lies the stunning Herzog & de Meuron-designed "bird nest" Olympic Stadium. Right next to it is the equally mesmerizing National Aquatics Center, a square structure with bubbled blue translucent walls known as the Water Cube. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge has called this soon-to-be-completed sports complex "nothing short of staggering."

How successfully Beijing has turned the Games into a global coming-out party is—for anyone who, like me, came to know China when Mao still held sway—a mind-bending accomplishment. What has happened here in the intervening years is perhaps the most dramatic story of national transformation in human history. However, the environmental costs of China's hell-bent development have been severe. The Aquatics Center in particular poses one critical question: where will all the water to fill this bold but massive architectural masterpiece—and to supply the Games—come from? After all, Beijing sits on the parched North China Plain, one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with 65 percent of China's agriculture and only 24 percent of its water. Moreover, because only 278 of China's 661 major cities have sewage-treatment plants, 70 percent of the country's rivers are severely polluted.

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Threat to key water supply reaffirmed

A Superior Court judge has refused to back down from a ruling that in two months could virtually shut down the State Water Project, stopping the flow of Northern California water to Central Valley farms and 17 million Southern Californians.

Over the objections of water officials, Alameda County Judge Frank Roesch this week reasserted a preliminary March ruling in which he found that the California Department of Water Resources had not obtained the proper state environmental permits to operate the huge pumps that siphon water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, in the process killing threatened and endangered fish.

The judge has given the department 60 days from the issuance of his final order to comply with the California Endangered Species Act, or he will turn off the pumps.

Water officials have warned that a prolonged pumping shutdown would wreak havoc on the California economy and slash water deliveries to urban Southern California at a time when the region is experiencing what is on track to be the driest year on record.

Water department Director Lester Snow said his agency would appeal the decision.

"The 60-day clock starts ticking on what would be a devastating blow to the state's water system," he said.

In the meantime, his agency is asking the state Department of Fish and Game to allow fish to be killed at the Harvey O. Banks Delta Pumping Plant, based on existing federal environmental permits. The pumps have long been a focal point of concern over the effect of huge water diversions from the delta, which is part of the largest estuary on the West Coast and has been severely degraded by farming, contaminants and water deliveries that have altered its natural tidal rhythms.

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Water wars in arid north Nigeria

Edith Obeta, a petty trader and mother of two accuses another woman, Hadiza Haruna of pushing her jerry can aside to get ahead in the dodgy queue. Mrs Haruna denies the accusation and a fight seems to be brewing.

"Look, this water pump works only once a day or once in two days, when we have public electricity supply," Mrs Obeta explains.

"So, you have to do all you can to collect some water before the electricity goes off again. As you can see yourself, it's not a tea party."

The water is not free. A 20 litre jerry can is sold for 20 Naira ($0.16).

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Melting Himalayan glaciers pose security risk -UNEP

Global warming will cause the Himalayan glaciers to melt, leading to mass migration and possibly conflicts over valuable resources such as agricultural land and fresh water, the U.N. Environment Programme chief said.

Achim Steiner, speaking ahead of the U.N. Security Council's first-ever debate on climate change, said that global warming should be considered a security issue as shortages of water and fertile land in the next 10 to 20 years may lead to conflicts.

The melting of the Himalayan glaciers is expected to displace millions of people from low-lying land as sea levels rise, and will disrupt river flows and irrigation of agricultural land.

"When people start moving, it puts people into competition with one another," Steiner told Reuters in a phone interview from Nairobi. "Where will these people go? Where will they run to where other communities want them?"

The Himalayan glaciers, which feed rivers in India and China, are among the fastest-melting in the world.

Scientists have said the Himalayan glaciers could shrink to 100,000 square km (38,610 square miles) by the 2030s, from 500,000 square km (193,100 square miles) now, if the current pace of global warming continues.

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A Plan to Curb Farm-to-Watershed Pollution of Chesapeake Bay

Andy Young’s dairy cows produce a lot of milk. They also produce a lot of manure. How much manure ends up in a nearby creek — and ultimately Chesapeake Bay — is the question at the center of an unusual effort to reinvigorate the bay’s declining grasses, crabs, fish and oysters.

The dairy farms here in Lancaster County, among the top milk-producing counties in the nation, send more manure into the waterways that drain into Chesapeake Bay than any other part of the bay’s 64,000-square-mile watershed. Now the state of Pennsylvania is trying to get farmers like Mr. Young to reduce the damaging runoff by letting them apply for pollution credits that can be sold to developers needing to build sewage treatment plants.


The goal of the experiment is to pump new life into the bay, which was once the showpiece of the Eastern Seaboard but has been in biological decline for three decades, in large part because of manure and other agricultural pollutants.

In March, the Chesapeake Bay Program, a federal-state partnership, reported a 25 percent decline from 2005 to 2006 in the underwater grasses that are the anchor of the bay’s ecosystem. Algae thrives on the nitrogen in manure and other waste products and the phosphorus in fertilizer, becoming so abundant that it blocks sunlight and, by consuming oxygen as it decays, threatens to suffocate the grasses and other underwater life.
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City’s Catskill Water Gets 10-Year Approval

After an exacting review that lasted several years, federal environmental officials have concluded that New York City’s upstate water supply is still so clean that it does not need to be filtered for another decade or longer.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s announcement yesterday extending the city’s current exemption from filtration requirements means that at least until 2017, New York City will not have to spend as much as $8 billion to build a filtration plant that would cost millions of dollars a year to operate.

About 90 percent of the one billion gallons used in the city each day comes from a system of huge reservoirs in the Catskill Mountains, 120 miles north of the city. The remaining 10 percent is drawn from closer reservoirs surrounded by development in Westchester County and will have to be filtered. A $2 billion filtration plant under construction in the Bronx is scheduled to be operational by 2012.

As a condition for the extension for the Catskill filtration exemption, the city has agreed to set aside $300 million over the next 10 years to acquire land upstate to restrain development that causes runoff and pollution.

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Dam project aims to save Aral Sea

As the sun rises above the Aral Sea, Alek, a local fisherman, steers the boat, leans forward and pulls the net out of the glittering water. It is full of carp, sturgeon and flounder - just two years ago he could not have even dreamt of this catch.

"All thanks to the dam," Alek grins as he throws the fish into a growing pile on the bottom of his rowing boat. The dam is part of a $68m project, initiated by the Kazakh government and financed by loans from the World Bank.

It is an ambitious undertaking that aims to reverse one of the world's worst man-made environmental disasters and bring back the sea which many predicted could never return.

"The Aral Sea did not die, the Aral Sea was murdered," said Nazhbagin Musabaev, the governor of the Aralsk region.

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Climate change will stress sewer systems

Climate change is expected to drive more harmful sewage into the Great Lakes unless officials build extra capacity into wastewater treatment systems, a federal study says.

But Michigan communities in the Saginaw Bay area and elsewhere aren't accounting for climate change when they go about constructing and upgrading wastewater plants that are expected to last far into the future.

State Department of Environmental Quality leaders will be examining a draft ''screening assessment'' released for comment last month by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

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As a glacier melts, so does a Peruvian water supply

The Qori Kalis glacier in the Andes of southwest Peru is retreating by about 600 feet a year. Its icy blue headwall is melting away. As the ice disappears, so does the water supply for hundreds of thousands of people in the valley below. Cuzco, the closest big city, is already starting to ration water.

"You can almost sit there and watch it retreat," says Lonnie Thompson, a 58-year-old Ohio State University geologist whose research first brought him to the glacier in the late 1970s. He has returned about 20 times. "It's kind of like watching your buddy die," Thompson said.

The glacier, part of the world's largest tropical ice cap, has not been this small for at least 5,000 years, based on analysis of dead plants that have been left by the retreating glacier. Eventually, dams will be needed to store water in the rainy season and release it in the dry season, Thompson said.

"Of course, Peru is not a rich country," he said.

Beneath the glacier's headwall, meltwater has formed a 200-foot-deep lake. Below that is an expansive plain, normally a grassland dotted with alpacas. On Thompson's most recent return last spring, the plain was coated with silt. An avalanche of rock and ice, unleashed by warming, had landed in the lake and set off a flood through the valley. The animals were gone.

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The driest periods of the last century — the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the droughts of the 1950s — may become the norm in the Southwest United States

The driest periods of the last century — the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the droughts of the 1950s — may become the norm in the Southwest United States within decades because of global warming, according to a study released Thursday.

The research suggests that the transformation may already be underway. Much of the region has been in a severe drought since 2000, which the study's analysis of computer climate models shows as the beginning of a long dry period.

The study, published online in the journal Science, predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest — one of the fastest-growing regions in the nation.

The data tell "a story which is pretty darn scary and very strong," said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate researcher at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study.

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An Arid West No Longer Waits for Rain

A Western drought that began in 1999 has continued after the respite of a couple of wet years that now feel like a cruel tease. But this time people in the driest states are not just scanning the skies and hoping for rescue.

Some $2.5 billion in water projects are planned or under way in four states, the biggest expansion in the West’s quest for water in decades. Among them is a proposed 280-mile pipeline that would direct water to Las Vegas from northern Nevada. A proposed reservoir just north of the California-Mexico border would correct an inefficient water delivery system that allows excess water to pass to Mexico.

In Yuma, Ariz., federal officials have restarted an idled desalination plant, long seen as a white elephant from a bygone era, partly in the hope of purifying salty underground water for neighboring towns.

The scramble for water is driven by the realities of population growth, political pressure and the hard truth that the Colorado River, a 1,400-mile-long silver thread of snowmelt and a lifeline for more than 20 million people in seven states, is providing much less water than it had.

According to some long-term projections, the mountain snows that feed the Colorado River will melt faster and evaporate in greater amounts with rising global temperatures, providing stress to the waterway even without drought. This year, the spring runoff is expected to be about half its long-term average. In only one year of the last seven, 2005, has the runoff been above average.

Everywhere in the West, along the Colorado and other rivers, as officials search for water to fill current and future needs, tempers are flaring among competing water users, old rivalries are hardening and some states are waging legal fights.

In one of the most acrimonious disputes, Montana filed a suit in February at the United States Supreme Court accusing Wyoming of taking more than its fair share of water from the Tongue and Powder Rivers, north-flowing tributaries of the Yellowstone River that supply water for farms and wells in both states.

Preparing for worst-case outcomes, the seven states that draw water from the Colorado River — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico in the upper basin and California, Arizona and Nevada in the lower basin — and the United States Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the river, are considering plans that lay out what to do if the river cannot meet the demand for water, a prospect that some experts predict will occur in about five years.

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