Saturday, July 31, 2010

Growing Shortages of Water Threaten China’s Development

On a recent visit to the Gobi desert, which stretches across China’s western Gansu province, I came upon an unusual sign. In the midst of a dry, sandy expanse stood a large billboard depicting a settlement the government intended to build nearby — white buildings surrounded by lush, green, landscaped lawns, and in the center a vast, gleaming blue reservoir. The illustration’s bright colors were quite unlike the actual surroundings, which consisted of dull sky that faded into a horizon of undulating, parched-brown hillsides.

Still, the billboard’s promise was clear: Through feats of engineering and willpower, specifically the planned construction of a series of aqueducts to bring water from a tributary of China’s Yellow River, the government pledged to build new homes and remake nature. Let there be water.

My companion, the young Chinese environmentalist Zhao Zhong, founder of the nonprofit group, Green Camel Bell, was dubious. He pointed out that not only has the water level of the Yellow River been declining in recent years, in some months no longer reaching the Pacific Ocean, but that the river is now an estimated 10 percent sewage by volume. Watering the desert seemed to him, quite literally, a pipe dream.

Yet the sign conjuring an oasis in the desert does point to a very real dilemma: In order to sustain its rapid development, China needs a lot of water. It can only build as many cities as it can supply with clean water. And the country’s water supply is precariously limited: The Middle Kingdom is home to 20 percent of world’s population, but just 7 percent of its available freshwater resources. Rapid urbanization is quickly increasing demand for fresh water, while climate change threatens to further reduce availability.

Wang Rusong, an expert in urban ecosystems at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an environmental advisor to Beijing’s mayor, told me when I visited his offices in May that China’s most worrisome environmental challenge is not what it has too much of — pollution, sewage, carbon emissions, etc. — but what it doesn’t have enough of: “The limiting factor in Beijing’s development is water,” he said. And Beijing is hardly alone.

more from Yale 360

A river again?

Behind the parking lot of a dilapidated casino in the city of Compton, Calif., runs a few miles of earthen-bottom creek, a tributary to the Los Angeles River, where blue herons alight on graffitied lamp posts and red-winged blackbirds feed among the cattails. Environmentalists have long fought to save this rare patch of urban nature from development, dredging and dumping, not just for the sake of open space in this park-poor neighborhood, but for water quality: Those cattails, for example, consume nitrogen from fertilizer runoff bound for the ocean.

But the creek's defenders have had scant legal basis for their fight: In 2008, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided that only four miles of the Los Angeles qualified as "navigable" under the Clean Water Act, meaning the eight major tributaries of the concrete trapezoidal channel L.A. stubbornly insists on calling a river remained stranded outside the protection of the federal law.

That changed on July 8, when EPA administrator Lisa Jackson stood on Compton's banks and declared all 51 miles of the Los Angeles River a "traditional navigable river." That means Compton and the other tributaries now pass "the Rapanos test" -- named for the Michigan scofflaw in U.S. v. Rapanos who paved a wetland to put up a shopping mall and, thanks to a landmark 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision, got away with it. Rapanos limited Clean Water Act protection to waterways that have "a significant nexus" to navigable U.S. waters. That the Los Angeles River's tributaries now count among them won't stop every attempt to alter a creek, but it imposes an extra layer of pollution limits, subjecting development plans in the creek beds and floodplains to more lengthy and costly review processes.

"The EPA's decision could set a different paradigm for conservation here," says Meredith McCarthy, the director of programs at the nonprofit Heal the Bay and a key defender of Compton Creek. "We could be moving in the direction of valuing nature in urban centers."

That seemed to be the point Jackson was trying to make, too, in concert with other federal officials accompanying her on a national tour for President Obama's "America's Great Outdoors" initiative. She frankly assailed Rapanos and its companion, U.S. v. Carabell, another Michigan wetland case in which the court ruled in favor of a developer. "Those decisions made it such that we couldn't tell whether a creek like the one we stand before in an urban area was water," she told her listeners. "(But) ladies and gentlemen, this is a watershed."

After her talk, Jackson ventured down to the water. "She put on yellow waders and followed us in," says Miguel Luna of the nonprofit Urban Semillas, who teaches middle- and high-school students to test water in city streams. "The kids got a chance to explain to her what kind of data they were collecting and why."

more from High Country News

Monday, July 26, 2010

Delaware Drinking Water at Risk: Filtering strongly recommended

Kim Furtado filters every drop of water her family drinks, using an on-tap fixture.

Then she filters it again with a countertop model.

Her drinking water comes from "one of those shallow wells," said Furtado, a naturopathic health practitioner from Millsboro. "It's 60 feet deep and I'm not very comfortable with it."

Sixty miles north, Richard F. Davis, a former state representative and a DuPont Co. chemist, relies on a whole-house filter in his Mariners Watch neighborhood, three miles west of the Delaware City Refinery. Artesian Water supplies the community and, by law, routinely tests its supplies, taken from some of the state's deepest aquifers.

Davis, who said he considers his water safe, still wanted something extra.

"Since all of the water systems are interconnected," Davis said, "it's impossible to know where all the water comes from."

It's also difficult to get an absolute answer about just what is, or isn't, in Delaware's water -- difficult enough that some real estate agents routinely suggest water-filter installations even in the absence of known problems.

Although most residents are supplied by regularly tested public drinking water systems, thousands of unregulated substances can be found in the environment and water. Thousands of homes, meanwhile, take water directly from the ground, with testing left up to the owners.

Testing is a critical routine for most of the state's water suppliers. Filtering is ubiquitous.

"If people aren't asking about them, they should," said Pauline Murray, a real estate agent with Murray Realty in Newark. "A filter system would probably be an advantage. City water is loaded with stuff just as much as anywhere else."

more from Wilmington News Journal

Friday, July 23, 2010

Streams Of Noxiousness

Long after crews have cleaned up a chemical spill on the ground, the contaminants persist underground and eventually make their way through the soil and rock to groundwater that supplies drinking wells and sustains aquatic ecosystems. Now scientists have developed an easier way to monitor groundwater contamination in cities, which should allow for more proactive screening (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es101492x).

In urban areas, spills from manufacturing plants and underground gasoline storage tanks "can act as long-term sources of groundwater contamination, lasting from decades to centuries," says hydrogeologist James Roy at Environment Canada, the nation's environmental regulation agency. But monitoring urban groundwater is patchy at best, because it often depends on sampling from observation wells. In cities, drilling these wells is costly, time-consuming, and sometimes unfeasible due to land ownership issues.

Roy and his colleagues wanted to develop an approach that avoided these wells. So they decided to sample from urban streams, which often run through public land and receive discharge from groundwater.

The researchers collected groundwater beneath streams in three Canadian cities: Angus, Ontario; Amherst, Nova Scotia; and Halifax, Nova Scotia. The team used a device that consisted of a steel tube attached to a drive head, which they could drill into the sediment at the stream's bottom. Holes in the drive head allowed the researchers to pump water from below the streambed into collection tubes for analysis. They collected multiple samples along several-hundred-meter stretches of the streams to perform a complete survey of the area's groundwater.

In these test streams, the researchers detected previously-identified chlorinated solvent contaminants from nearby dry-cleaning shops and an aerospace facility. But they also identified a broad range of unexpected contaminants, such as petroleum, arsenic, and chemical signatures consistent with sewage and lawn-care products. The technique is only semi-quantitative, so the scientists could not measure exact quantities of these pollutants.

Still Brewster Conant, a hydrogeologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, says that by sampling below streambeds, this new approach offers "a good reconnaissance method for determining contamination problems in a watershed."

from EST news

Map Illustrates Extent of World’s Marine Dead Zones

A new NASA map illustrates the significant expansion of the world’s marine dead zones, deepwater regions where dissolved oxygen is so low marine species cannot survive. Many of these dead zones occur off densely populated coastlines, particularly along the eastern United States and in Northern Europe. Scientists produced the map using data from satellites that can detect high concentrations of particulate matter, an indicator of overly fertile waters that can create dead zones. The zones arise when fertilizers applied to crops wash into streams and rivers, eventually reaching coastal waters, where the excess nutrients trigger massive algae blooms. When the algae die, they sink to the ocean’s depths, where they essentially become fertilizer for microbes that decompose the organic matter and consume oxygen, suffocating marine life. In 2008, a study found that dead zones had spread exponentially since the 1960s, affecting more than 400 ecosystems and a total area of more than 152,000 square miles (245,000 square kilometers).

from Yale 360

Dams for Patagonia

In rolling hills at the foot of a basalt massif, the people of this compact, ordered town live mainly by fishing and cattle ranching. For many, life is not dramatically different from that experienced by the pioneers who first cleared the valley nearly a century ago and built timber homes. But graffiti around town reveal a new disquiet. "Patagonia Sin Represas!" ("Patagonia Without Dams!") is perhaps the politest of the slogans sprayed across the walls and buildings of this place, the capital of the Aysén region in Patagonia. They reflect anger over plans to build at least seven major hydropower dams in the area.

Home to condors and alpaca-like guanacos, puma, and blue whales, Patagonia is the tail end of the Americas, one of the last accessible nowhere lands on the planet. It contains the Southern Ice Field, the world's third most important reserve of freshwater after Antarctica and Greenland. And in its untamed wilderness of glaciers and mountain peaks, companies are preparing to raise not just hydrodams but also a 70-meter-high transmission line to transport power more than 2400 kilometers north to Santiago, Chile's capital, and the energy-hungry mines beyond. The line would require one of the world's biggest clearcuts, a 120-meter-wide corridor through ancient forests—fragmenting ecosystems—and the installation of more than 5000 transmission towers.

Proponents of the dams argue that hydroelectricity is a clean source of energy, that Chile needs the 3500 MW/yr of power to meet its development goals and, lacking oil or coal reserves, has no viable alternative (see sidebar, p. 384). But more than 50 international environmental groups have come together to try to block dam construction under the umbrella organization that uses the slogan "Patagonia Sin Represas" as its name.

more from Science

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Does Egypt Own The Nile? A Battle Over Precious Water

A simmering dispute over who owns the waters of the River Nile is heating up. From its headwaters in Ethiopia and the central African highlands to the downstream regional superpower Egypt, the Nile flows through 10 nations. But by a quirk of British colonial history, only Egypt and its neighbor Sudan have any rights to its water.

That is something the upstream African nations say they can no longer accept. Yet as the nations of the Nile bicker over its future, nobody is speaking up for the river itself — for the ecosystems that depend on it, or for the physical processes on which its future as a life-giving resource in the world’s largest desert depends. The danger is that efforts to stave off water wars may lead to engineers trying to squeeze yet more water from the river — and doing the Nile still more harm. What is at risk here is not only the Nile, but also the largest wetland in Africa and one of the largest tropical wetlands in the world — the wildlife-rich Sudd.

Built in the 1960s, the High Aswan dam allows Egypt to control the flow of the Nile.
In May, five upstream Nile nations — Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda — signed a treaty declaring their rights to a share of the river’s flow. They said they would no longer be bound by a treaty drawn up by the British in 1959. That treaty had given Egypt 55.5 cubic kilometers of the river’s flow and Sudan 18.5 cubic kilometers, but no formal entitlements for any nation upstream.

In essence the five nations were calling Egypt’s bluff. Egypt entirely controls the river’s flow from the moment it crosses the border from Sudan and is captured by the High Aswan dam, built by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser with Russian help in the 1960s. But Egypt’s control depends on what comes downstream, over which it has no control. In the past, Egypt has frequently said any attempt by upstream nations to take what it regarded as Egyptian water would result in war.

more from EHN 360

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Parched California: Severe water shortages loom

Over 1,100 U.S. counties— more than one-third of all counties in the lower 48 states — now face higher risks of water shortages by mid-century as the result of global warming and more than 400 of these counties – many within the Central Valley -- will be at extremely high risk for water shortages, based on estimates from a new report by Tetra Tech for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The report uses publicly available water use data across the United States and climate projections from a set of models used in recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) work to evaluate withdrawals related to renewable water supply.

The report finds that 14 states face an extreme or high risk to water sustainability, or are likely to see limitations on water availability as demand exceeds supply by 2050.

These areas include parts of Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. In particular, in the Great Plains and Southwest United States, water sustainability is at extreme risk.

The more than 400 counties identified as being at greatest risk in the report reflects a 14-times increase from previous estimates.

more from the NY Times

Monday, July 19, 2010

China Three Gorges dam faces major flood test

China's massive Three Gorges dam is facing a major test of the flood control function that was one of the key justifications for its construction, as torrential rains swell the rivers that feed it, state media said Monday.

Much of China has been suffering flooding and landslides after weeks of torrential downpours. At least 146 people have died since the start of this month, as a result of the rains, and another 40 are missing.

The peak flow of water hitting the giant reservoir on the Yangtze River, China's longest, will be higher than in 1998 when devastating floods killed over 4,000 people and forced some 18 million to relocate, the official China Daily said.

Engineers have raised the rate at which water is being sluiced out of the reservoir, to make room for new waves of floodwaters expected this week.

"The levels of this flooding will be higher than the historic floods of 1954 and 1998," Wei Shanzhong, Head of the Flood Control and Drought Administration office for the Yangtze River, told state Television.

"The rain in the gorges area will have an immediate affect on the water flow, to around 70,000 cubic meters (per second)."

Overall however, the flood this year is expected to be shorter than the 1998 disaster.

When the flood-tide hits, locks that allow shipping on the reservoir up to the city of Chongqing, a southwestern hub, will be closed if the water comes faster than 45,000 cubic meters per second, the China Daily report added.

The dam was given the go-ahead by the government in 1992, against unusually visible domestic opposition -- with environmentalists warning the reservoir could turn into a cesspool of raw sewage and industrial chemicals trapped behind the dam, and feared silt could also cause problems.

The government justified its decision to push ahead by citing massive clean power generation and flood control were cited as the reasons it was pushed through. If it fails in the latter task it will add to concerns about the dam's overall cost and impact.

more from Reuters

Thursday, July 08, 2010

The Gulf of Mexico's Dead Zone is among the world's largest—and corn is one of the culprits

For the hundreds of thousands of people in the Gulf of Mexico who depend on commercial and sport fishing, directly and indirectly, the assault on sea life from the BP oil disaster has been a serious blow. But it's hardly unfamiliar.

That's because even before the spill, up to 8,000 square miles of gulf waters would turn every year into dead zones—vast areas of the coast so depleted of oxygen that shrimp, crabs and other marine animals could no longer live.

Now scientists fear the BP spill will make a bad situation worse. Despite blithe predictions that the gulf fishing industry will bounce back like Alaska's after the Exxon Valdez disaster, the already-expanding Gulf Dead Zone presents a uniquely dangerous scenario that many fear poses a long-term threat to ocean life.

First noted by scientists in the 1960s, dead zones are formed when huge amounts of nutrients—such as those found in agricultural fertilizers, municipal sewage and other wastes—overload the water, leading to explosive algae growth that ultimately robs oxygen from marine life below.

A 2008 study found more than 400 dead zones around the world, and the Gulf of Mexico's is one of the largest. Snaking along the Louisiana and Texas coasts, the expanding Gulf Dead Zone has drastically reduced seafood stocks and pushed fishers further out to sea.

The primary culprit? Nitrate-laced runoff from agricultural operations along the Mississippi River, which eventually drain into gulf waters. One study found that 51 percent of the Mississippi's nitrogen load was from commercial fertilizer, with livestock manure, human sewage and runoff from other crops contributing to the mix.

Fall weather brings cooling air and churning waters that dampen algae growth, but scientists are now seeing a "legacy" effect where lingering decomposed organic matter continues to steal away oxygen. This means that even if nitrate levels hold steady or decline, past pollution can still cause dead zones to expand in the future.

Now add the BP disaster. Gushing oil is the most immediate threat to marine life, but scientists see another looming danger: methane, which BP itself has estimated constitutes 40 percent of what's flooding out of the Deepwater Horizon drill site.

more from Durham (NC) Independent Weekly

China launches armada to head off algae plume

Chinese authorities have dispatched a flotilla of more than 60 ships to head off a massive tide of algae that is approaching the coast of Qingdao.

The outbreak is thought to be caused by high ocean temperatures and excess nitrogen runoff from agriculture and fish farms.

Scientists involved in the operation say the seaweed known as enteromorpha needs to be cleaned up before it decomposes on beaches and releases noxious gases.

According to the domestic media, the green tide covers an area of 400 sq km. Newspapers ran pictures of coastguard officials raking up the gunk as soon as it reached the shore.

As well as the 66 vessels sent to intercept the approaching algae, a net has been stretched offshore as an extra defence. Ten forklift trucks, seven lorries and 168 people were clearing up the many tonnes of seaweed that still got through.

Li Delin, the engineer in charge of the beach clearance, estimated that his team had collected about 3,900 tonnes as of today. The seaweed has been taken away to be processed, possibly for use as natural fertiliser or animal feed.

And more is on the way. Northern China has been experiencing the hottest week of the year – in some areas, such as Beijing, temperatures have reached highs not seen in decades – which was accelerating the growth of the algae.

Green and red tides have become increasingly common across the world since the 1970s. Usually they occur in coastal water near densely populated areas or where there is large-scale runoff of agricultural chemicals from farmland.

more from the Guardian (UK)

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

A river's reckoning



Chicago likes to think of the filth flowing in its namesake river as nobody's business but its own, and for most of the last century that might have been true. But today that dirty water has become a problem for all the Great Lakes - the world's largest freshwater system and a drinking water source for 40 million people.

Blame the Asian carp.

More than a century ago, the city reversed the Chicago River to carry its sewage away from Lake Michigan and into a Mississippi River-bound canal system. Today, those canals have become a flashpoint in the battle to protect the Great Lakes from the leaping carp that can devastate prized fish populations and inflict brutal blows on unsuspecting boaters.

With the invaders finning their way up the canal waters toward the Lake Michigan shoreline, a push is on to reconstruct the natural barrier between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basins that the Chicago canals destroyed so long ago.

It is a project that would almost surely mean that Chicago's river - and some of the city's wastewater - would again flow into Lake Michigan.

This itself would be an ecological disaster - if Chicago sewage officials can't figure out how to clean up sewage discharges that are among the nastiest in the nation.

Chicago has a rare distinction among major American cities: It does not employ a disinfection stage at its three main sewage treatment plants.

The result is a river and canal system running so thick with fecal coliform that signs along the banks warn that the contents below are not suitable for "any human body contact."

It is poison, basically.

Even before the carp arrived, conservationists had been pushing the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago to not just do basic sewage treatment, but also to disinfect its discharges, a step nearly every other major American city takes. That's something the district boss dismisses as not worth the expense, which would be no more than $2 to $3 per household per month according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The reclamation district shows no signs of budging on the issue, even as pressure mounts to do whatever it will take to safeguard the Great Lakes - and its $7 billion fishing industry - from what biologists call a menacing invader.

That's not what reclamation district boss Richard Lanyon calls the fish.

He calls them "these stupid Asian carp."

more from the Journal-Sentinel