Top water utilities to study climate change

Eight of the top U.S. water utilities are joining forces to study how rising sea levels, droughts and other effects of global warming are taking a toll on supplies of drinking water, they said on Tuesday.

The coalition, known as the Water Utility Climate Alliance, said water agencies need access to the best possible climate change research as they prepare to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure over the next 15 years.

"Our systems are facing risk due to diminishing snowpack, bigger storms, more frequent drought and rising sea levels," said Susan Leal, general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, a member of the alliance. "We need to be organized to respond to these risks -- that's why we've formed this alliance."

Other members of the coalition include Denver Water, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, the Portland Water Bureau, the San Diego County Water Authority, the Seattle Public Utilities and the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

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The 'French Chernobyl' that has poisoned the Rhône's fish

From a wooden jetty, Cédric Giroud gazed out over the wide bend of the river Rhône, a picturesque, dark blue expanse dotted with swans. "At midnight on summer nights, when I'd finished fishing and boxed up my catch, I'd slip into the water and swim in the moonlight," he said.

The swell in the Rhône at the Grand Large just outside Lyon draws tens of thousands of French tourists on holiday weekends. It is a haven for rowers, sailors, fishermen and children feeding ducks. But under the crystal clear water lurks an environmental disaster the conservation group WWF is calling "a French Chernobyl".

The French government has banned the consumption of fish from the length of the Rhône - where it enters France from the Swiss Alps all the way down to the Mediterranean - after local specialities such as bream, pikeperch, carp and catfish were found to contain high levels of the toxic chemicals PCBs. France's second longest river has contaminated sediment in its bed and feeding fish have sent the toxins through the food chain. Environmentalists say the poison Rhône, which flows through tourist spots such as the papal city of Avignon down to the Camargue delta, is the tip of the iceberg of French industrial pollution, which the government has recklessly ignored for 20 years.

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Dire Gulf forecast may be fishy

Dire predictions about the long-term health of fish species in the Gulf of Mexico and worldwide may be overblown, according to new research from LSU fisheries scientists.

A paper published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science says several recent high-profile studies have used misleading data to show that the world's wild fish populations could face total collapse within decades.

The authors acknowledge that many species are in danger, including the Gulf's red snapper, but they say painting too broad a picture undermines the credibility of the predictions.

"Creating false alarms or crying wolf doesn't help the situation, because people get numb to it," said James Cowan, one of the LSU coastal fisheries researchers who worked on the paper along with professors at the University of Washington. "We know there are problems out there and that the problems are real. But it's important for us to be honest about what we do and don't know."

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Paying the price for past pollution policy

Thousands of tons of waste dumped in a landfill site near Fribourg between 1952 and 1973 is now threatening river life in the area.

Experts say the case is typical of past environmental practices in Switzerland, when no protection laws existed. Many more sites are said to be affected.

Waste disposal sites like La Pila, in French-speaking Switzerland, were the norm mid last century, when the country was undergoing a period of economic growth.

"Nobody realised that the environment had a limited capacity to absorb harmful substances," said Marc Chardonnens, head of the canton Fribourg environment office.

Waste was simply dumped anywhere with no anti-pollution measures taken, he added.

At La Pila around 240,000 cubic metres of industrial and domestic waste products was tipped into the site. In 1973, when the dump was closed, it was simply covered over with soil – as was usual at the time.

"We don't know for certain what exactly is underground. It was not obligatory to keep a register of waste in landfills," Chardonnens told swissinfo.

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In Remote Valley, a Grim Redefinition of ‘Fishing’

Catching freshwater shrimp in the legendary Rio Grande here in the forested hills of eastern Jamaica used to be done at night with a homemade bamboo torch in one hand and a sharp spear in the other.

Wave the flame low over the water and the shrimp eyes glow. Aim the spear with a steady hand and throw. It is painstaking work. The results, though, are worth the effort — succulent shrimp, known locally as janga, that can be the size of lobsters.

Elders recall going down to the river just before dinnertime and plucking out as many shrimp as were needed that evening. The creatures were thrown in a pot with coconut milk, tomatoes and plenty of spice. The smell alone would bring the children to the table.

But those days are fading. Shrimp are getting harder to find on the Rio Grande, and those who live by its banks now eat more chicken and goat. When they do eat the shrimp, they must inspect them carefully inside and out for signs of poison.

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Lake Mead Could Be Within a Few Years of Going Dry, Study Finds

Lake Mead, the vast reservoir for the Colorado River water that sustains the fast-growing cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, could lose water faster than previously thought and run dry within 13 years, according to a new study by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The lake, located in Nevada and Arizona, has a 50 percent chance of becoming unusable by 2021, the scientists say, if the demand for water remains unchanged and if human-induced climate change follows climate scientists’ moderate forecasts, resulting in a reduction in average river flows.

Demand for Colorado River water already slightly exceeds the average annual supply when high levels of evaporation are taken into account, the researchers, Tim P. Barnett and David W. Pierce, point out. Despite an abundant snowfall in Colorado this year, scientists project that snowpacks and their runoffs will continue to dwindle. If they do, the system for delivering water across the Southwest would become increasingly unstable.

“We were really sort of stunned,” Professor Barnett said in an interview. “We didn’t expect such a big problem basically right on our front doorstep. We thought there’d be more time.”

He added, “You think of what the implications are, and it’s pretty scary.”

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Creative Juices Flow for Pro Bono Effort to Aid Global Water Projects

LIKE the ripples from a drop of rain when it falls on a pond, a charitable campaign created last year by a New York boutique agency is arriving next month in more than a dozen other cities, and there are plans to expand it globally in 2009.

The water simile is apt, because the campaign benefits efforts by Unicef to provide clean drinking water to children in the third world. Thirteen agencies and the Adcenter at Virginia Commonwealth University are joining forces with the Droga5 boutique, which originated the campaign, to produce the 2008 version.

New York is returning for a second year of the campaign. Additional markets scheduled to take part are Boston; Chicago; Cincinnati; Dallas; Los Angeles; Milwaukee; New Orleans; Portland, Ore.; Richmond, Va.; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; and several cities in South Carolina.

The campaign, called the Tap Project (tapproject.org), encourages diners at participating restaurants during the week of March 16 to donate $1 each time they order local tap water instead of bottled water. Thousands of patrons at 300 or so New York restaurants took part in the first Tap Project last March, raising about $100,000.

Three months later, the campaign won Droga5 a prestigious award for creative innovation, known as the Titanium Lion, at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes, France. That got the attention of other agencies and helped the United States Fund for Unicef recruit other shops to collaborate with Droga5, part of the Publicis Groupe, on an expanded version of the campaign for 2008.

“The work highlighted in Cannes was such a brilliant, simple and disruptive idea,” said Erica Hoholick, group account director at one of the participating agencies, the Los Angeles office of TBWA/Chiat/Day.

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Drought spreading in Southeast

Georgians will be able to water their azaleas and swim in their pools this spring after the state eased a ban on outdoor watering.

Barely 400 miles away, residents of Raleigh, N.C., should be so lucky. Their city council just enacted the toughest water restrictions available, essentially banning all outdoor watering in Raleigh and six surrounding towns.

As the historic drought gripping much of the Southeast stretches into a second year, Atlanta and Raleigh find themselves in similar drought conditions but are adopting contrasting strategies.

Both depend on a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lake for drinking water — Atlanta on Lake Lanier, Raleigh on Falls Lake. Both have experienced explosive growth that is straining water supplies. Both are still among the hardest-hit places in the region as the drought shows the first signs of abating.

North Carolina environmentalists say Raleigh shouldn't aspire to be like Atlanta in water management. "Up here, we constantly point to Atlanta as the failed example of what happens when you don't plan," says Dean Naujoks of the Neuse River Foundation. "I'm hopeful we don't make the same mistakes Atlanta has made."

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Calif. Farmers Struggle with Reduced Water Supply

Severe droughts have combined with an unexpected culprit — a tiny fish — to put the squeeze on Southern California's water supply. Farmers in places like San Diego County are the first to feel the pinch.

Last month, the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies water to 18 million mostly urban customers in Southern California, started cutting water supplies to most agriculture customers by 30 percent. Urban users still have unlimited water.

Deal with the Devil

The cutbacks have their roots in California's last big drought, which took place in the late 1980s and early '90s. After that, the Metropolitan Water District invested in big water-storage projects, and to pay for them, it doubled water prices over a short time.

To keep their businesses afloat, most farmers made a kind of "deal with the devil."

"The deal was that, in exchange for a discount on the water rate, we would be willing to take the first cutbacks in an emergency situation," says Al Stehly, who manages about 450 acres of avocado trees for himself and other landowners in the county.

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Drought-stricken Georgia eyes Tennessee's border -- and river water

C. Barton Crattie, a Georgia land surveyor, did not expect to start a border war when he penned a newspaper article about a flawed 1818 survey that placed his state a mile below the Tennessee River.

The mistake in calculating Georgia's northern corner, he figured, was just an odd historical footnote, an interesting digression for those who fret that the drought-stricken state will soon run out of water. "Unfortunately for . . . Georgia," he wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "the corner is where the corner is."

The corner, however, is now the subject of Georgia state legislation: Sen. David Shafer and Rep. Harry Geisinger introduced bills to set up a commission to proclaim the states' "definite and true boundary lines." With an extreme water shortage in the north, legislators believe Georgians should no longer forfeit their right to the Tennessee River.

The resolution has provoked ridicule and scorn on the other side of the border. Tennessee state senators have proposed settling the matter with a game of football -- a dig at Georgia's recent scores. Others have threatened to fire rifles from Lookout Mountain.

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Deep-sea collapse

The effects of human-caused climate change might eventually reach one of the least explored realms of the planet: the bottom of the ocean. A new analysis of miniscule marine fossils from the last 20,000 years shows that during past periods of global cooling, changes in ocean circulation led to the collapse of deep-sea ecosystems.

Moriaki Yasuhara, then with the US Geological Survey, and colleagues studied a core of ocean floor sediment drilled in the northwest Atlantic, identifying fossil ostracodes — bivalved crustaceans less than two millimetres long — in each layer. Because their shells fossilize so well, diverse ostracode remains represent a vibrant deep-sea community overall. Layers deposited during hundreds or thousands of years of natural cooling revealed dramatic drops in the diversity of ostracode species. During these episodes, 'opportunistic' species, able to thrive amid decay, predominated. After one particularly vicious cooling cycle ended, species diversity took thousands of years to recover, probably because of a persistent change in deep ocean currents.

Deep-sea ecosystem collapses, the authors argue, could have arisen from both altered circulation and changing populations of the ostracodes' main food source, surface algae — which might result from anthropogenic warming as well as natural cooling. A rapidly changing climate could disrupt even deep-sea life, they conclude.

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Two billion face water famine as Himalayan glaciers melt

Two billion people face acute water shortage this century as Himalayan glaciers melt due to global warming. Still, there is hardly any detail on what exactly is happening to these glaciers.

"In India, glaciology has not received the attention it deserves," Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), said here Wednesday. "We've been ignoring it at our peril. Adaptation measures are crucial now."

Pachauri was speaking at a session on melting Himalayan glaciers, held in association with the Feb 7-9 Delhi Sustainable Development Summit (DSDS) that is being organised by TERI. Climate change is the DSDS theme this year.

Two billion people in the basins of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus, Mekong, Yellow and Yangtze rivers depend on the Himalayan glaciers for their water supply, Sayed I. Hasnain of the Centre for Policy Research pointed out at the session, which was organised by the German development agency GTZ.

Hasnain, one of the few glaciologists in India, said the melting of glaciers in the southern slopes of the Himalayas caused by climate change was being accelerated by the "Asian brown cloud", a pea soup of dust and soot, caused mainly by burning poor quality coal and firewood.

Agreeing that there was a serious dearth of research activity on Himalayan glaciers, Hasnain said the little work that had been done predicted that there would be a 20-30 percent increase in the water flow of the Ganges in the next four decades as the glaciers feeding the river melted, followed by a severe water shortage.

Such a scenario was quite likely to trigger major conflicts locally and internationally, warned Dirk Messner, director of the German Development Institute.

Messner identified South Asia as one of the major potential conflict zones, as people clashed over water and land and more migrations were caused by climate change and governments bickered over who would foot the bill.

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