Global Rundown
- Facilities that turn seawater into drinking water were bombed over the weekend in Bahrain and Iran as the conflict in the Middle East escalates to include public utilities.
- Dozens of people have died in floodwaters in Nairobi, Kenya, after more than four inches of rain fell on the capital in just 24 hours.
- North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality has rejected a federal project to widen Cape Fear amid concerns that the effort will worsen PFAS contamination.
- A new study suggests that “compound extreme” weather events in which severe heat waves precede droughts are becoming increasingly common across the globe.
The Lead
The New York Times is reporting that two desalination plants — one each in Bahrain and Iran — were damaged by bombs this weekend amid the escalating conflict in the Middle East, raising fears that civilian access to clean water will remain a strategic wartime target in one of the world’s driest regions.
Across the six member states of the Gulf Corporation Council — a regional political and economic union comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — 400 plants produce 40 percent of the world’s desalinated water, Al Jazeera reports.
A majority of Bahrain’s drinking water comes from these plants. The same is true of its neighbors: desalinated water accounts for 90 percent of drinking water in Kuwait, 86 percent in Oman, 70 percent in Saudi Arabia, and 42 percent in the United Arab Emirates, according to the Washington D.C.-based Arab Center.
Though no report is yet completely verified, the attack in Bahrain has been attributed to Iran, while Iranian officials say the United States was the first to introduce attacks on water.
“The US committed a blatant and desperate crime by attacking a freshwater desalination plant on Qeshm Island,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a post on X on Saturday. “Water supply in 30 villages has been impacted. Attacking Iran’s infrastructure is a dangerous move with grave consequences. The US set this precedent, not Iran.”
The status of both desalination plants is not immediately known. Across the entire Middle East, 330,000 people have been displaced amid increasing hostilities.
In context: Persian Gulf Desalination Plants Could Become Military Targets in Regional War
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This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers
More than a month’s worth of rain — roughly 4.5 inches — fell in the span of a day in Nairobi over the weekend. At least 42 people in the Kenyan capital were drowned or electrocuted by the floods, which swept away 172 vehicles and inundated infrastructure, Reuters reports.
Heading into the weekend, rainfall in the metro area — which is home to 6 million people — was expected to be severe, but some forecasts predicted less than one-third the rain that actually fell.
A 2024 report published by World Weather Attribution found that the impacts of human-caused climate change on the intensity of flooding and severity of rainfall were most acute in several regions of East Africa, including Nairobi proper.
The rains were the most severe since 2015, when nearly 7.5 inches of rain fell over the course of a day, the Guardian reports.
A planned $1.3 billion federal megaproject to widen and deepen the Cape Fear River in North Carolina has raised concerns that sediment known to be contaminated with PFAS will be spread further throughout the watershed, Scientific American reports.
Since 2017, when a series of investigative stories about the watershed’s PFAS problem were published, the public has known that drinking water and habitat in the 200-mile rivershed are contaminated with “forever chemicals.” Recent tests, including blood sampling alligators who call the river home, continue to confirm the pollutant’s pervasive reach.
As a result, environmental advocates and residents are resisting the project, which is intended to allow for greater boat and barge traffic. Roughly half of the estimated 35 million cubic yards of soil and sand that need to be moved will be placed on beaches or habitat restoration sites.
The project was paused in January amid escalating community concern. Last month, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) formally rejected an Army Corps of Engineers environmental impact assessment.
“The Division of Coastal Management’s decision will protect public health from forever chemicals like PFAS and preserve treasured coastal resources in the lower Cape Fear River Basin,” DEQ secretary Reid Wilson said in a statement. “If the Army Corps of Engineers can make changes to its proposal to protect people’s health and the environment, we are at the table to continue this conversation.”
On the Radar
A study published this week in the journal Science Advances suggests that periods of extreme heat, followed immediately by damaging drought, are becoming increasingly common around the world. In the 1980s, this “compound extreme” occurred over just 2.5 percent of earth’s surface. By 2023, which then set the record for the hottest year on record, this figure had increased to 16.7 percent. Over the last decade, the average was 7.9 percent.
The study’s authors say that heat-first droughts are most common in South America, the western United States and Canada, and parts of central and eastern Africa.
“The study illustrates a key point about climate change: the most damaging impacts often come from compound extremes,” Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria who was unaffiliated with the study, tells the Associated Press. “When heat waves, drought, and wildfire risk occur together — as we saw in events like the Russian heat wave of 2010 or the Australian bushfires in 2019-20 — the impacts can escalate quickly.”
In context: Constant, Compounding Disasters Are Exhausting Emergency Response
