- Britain’s water trade body says the country lacks sufficient water supplies to support its ambitious AI and hyperscale data center expansion plans.
- After years of drought, spring rains and warm temperatures have Canada’s wheat and canola farmers expecting one of the strongest harvests in nearly a decade.
- Some 40,000 acres of ancestral land have been returned to a tribe in the Klamath River basin, where $25 million worth of water quality improvement projects will soon begin.
- The Okefenokee Swamp, one of North America’s largest freshwater wetlands, has been designated as a UNESCO Heritage Site.
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Wheat growers in western Canada this summer are enjoying their most favorable farming conditions in a decade, Reuters reports, as abundant spring rains and warm temperatures have brought reprieve to the years-long drought that had stalked the region’s prairies.
Ravaged since 2020 by dry temperatures that reduced farmers’ yields and slashed their profits, Canada’s 120 million acres of prairie farmland — equivalent in size to the farmland of western Europe — are on pace for an abundant year, according to satellite and data analyses. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba produce the world’s largest canola crop and sizable harvests of wheat, lentils, and mustard.
The positive outlook comes despite extreme weather — including heatwaves, hailstorms and rain — battering much of North America, and a “super” El Niño that has already reduced expected wheat harvests this year in Australia and the United States.
40,000 acres of ancestral lands returned in Klamath River Basin
The second-largest “land-back” deal in California’s history was finalized last week, as some 40,000 acres of ancestral forests and fresh waterways were returned to the Quartz Valley Indian Reservation, located near the Oregon border and the Klamath Valley National Forest.
The deal was resolved by California’s State Water Resources Control Board, which is also providing the tribe with a $25 million loan for projects that improve water quality. These include efforts to restore Pacific salmon habitat, minimize fine sediment discharges into the local Scott River, control riverbank erosion, and reduce pollution.
“These lands have been woven into our story since time immemorial,” Quartz Valley Indian Reservation Tribal Chairman Leonard Lincoln said in a statement. “Fulfilling this long-held vision honors our ancestors and ensures that future generations will inherit not just stories, but actual homelands where they can practice our culture, hunt, and fish on our own land.”
From an ecological restoration perspective, the Klamath River basin has recently been the source of good news. Last year, thousands of acres around the waterway were returned to the Yurok Tribe — a deal which still stands as the largest-land back deal in the state — and the total removal of aging dams, many of them obsolete, from the river was completed in 2024.
These actions have been praised by environmentalists for their potential to improve water quality and habitat for Pacific salmon, a sacred species whose migrations to and from the river and Pacific Ocean were long disrupted by man-made impediments. But, as Circle of Blue first reported last year, the Trump administration’s rolling back of federal policies meant to protect endangered species, including salmon, is undermining these achievements.
Concerns persist, as the Department of the Interior announced final changes earlier this month to the Endangered Species Act, including eliminating the rule that had made it illegal to destroy an endangered species’ habitat.
Water UK, the trade body that represents water companies in England and Northern Ireland, warned last week in a letter to members of parliament that the country does not have enough water to continue building hyperscale data centers, which directly and indirectly consume large quantities of the resource. Several of the country’s new policies — including its “AI Opportunities Action Plan,” “AI for Science Strategy,” and “Delivering AI Growth Zones” effort — the body said, do not have a single mention of the word water.
“There appears to be an assumption that the country will always have enough water for its economic needs,” the trade body wrote in their publicly available letter. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
“Right now, houses are being blocked and businesses are unable to expand for no other reason than a lack of water,” the letter goes on to say. “The situation is so bad that, solely due to a lack of water, the Environment Agency objected to a cancer hospital being built in Cambridge. Water supplies are so low that it has forced a moratorium on business expansion in East Anglia and parts of Essex. A lack of water is the only thing stopping development in parts of Sussex, Suffolk and Lincolnshire. The problem is spreading.”
The Okefenokee Swamp, one of the world’s largest freshwater ecosystems and a U.S. National Wildlife Refuge that stretches across parts of Georgia and Florida, was recognized this week as a UNESCO Heritage Site, the United Nations announced.
The 402,000-acre wetland is the source of two major rivers in the American Southeast— the Suwannee and St. Marys, which together flow for hundreds of miles and feed the wells of thousands of regional residents — and in its layered beds of peat preserve 5,000 years of environmental records for scientists studying the history of Earth’s climate.
For years, the health of the swamp, considered one of the American South’s last truly wild places, has been threatened by mining interests drawn to the area for its minerals and supply of groundwater. The most recent threat was thwarted last summer when a conservation group purchased 8,000 acres of swampland adjacent to the refuge, ending a years-long saga with a proposed titanium mine that sought to begin operations in the area.
The swamp’s designation as a UNESCO Heritage Site, environmentalists hope, will spur additional protections and international support in the future.
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