Global Rundown
- The decades-long cleanup of sewage from Kentucky’s Hidden River Cave, part of a large karst aquifer, is being heralded as a major success.
- Texas lawmakers voted this week to approve a bill that would severely limit groundwater permitting and withdrawal from one of the state’s largest aquifers.
- Fluctuations between drought and heavy storms in Malawi, where more than four-fifths of the population are farmers, have created an ongoing crisis of internal displacement.
- Following a national energy auction, Brazil approved 65 new hydropower projects.
- Japan’s Lake Inawashiro has officially been registered as a new wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention.
The Lead
In Malawi, the world’s fourth-poorest country per capita, more than 80 percent of the population are farmers, and 90 percent of them do not use irrigation to grow crops.
But relying on the rain is risky. Consistent precipitation has been rare in recent years. Severe storms — such as Cyclone Freddy, which killed 1,000 people in 2023 — have increased in frequency and intensity, while El Niño conditions in 2024 forced officials to declare drought in 23 of 28 districts. Between May and September last year, an estimated 4.2 million people in Malawi faced acute food security.
These fluctuations are “pushing people from their homes,” the Guardian reports, as families move regionally in search of more stable climates and water access. “As a result of the dry spells, we’ve seen that a lot of livelihood activities have been affected, be it farming, whether it’s crops or livestock, but also even casual labour,” Master Simoni, who works for the International Organization for Migration, told the outlet.
In 2021, the World Bank estimated that by 2050, 86 million people in sub-Saharan Africa could be forced to move internally “due to slow-onset climate change impacts.” Since 2019, some 950,000 people have been displaced by cyclones alone. During last year’s drought, 400,000 people moved, primarily from southern Malawi to the country’s central and northern areas.
According to Unicef, 37 percent of Malawians in rural areas walk more than 30 minutes to retrieve water. It was estimated in 2019 that $97 million each year would be needed to bridge this gap for all Malawians by 2030, but with recent cuts to USAID “it could now be only one-sixth of the need.”
Recent WaterNews from Circle of Blue
- With Wildfire-Prevention Work, Flagstaff Seeks to Avoid the Next Devastating Flood — A severe fire in the city’s central watershed could lead to $2.8 billion in damages.
- Make America Polluted Again Starts in Iowa — Without controls, water contamination from Big Ag gets steadily worse.
This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers
11,300
Acres in eastern Texas that businessman Kyle Bass and his company Conservation Equity Management had purchased by May 2024, the Texas Tribune reports. That month, the firm announced plans to install more than 40 high-capacity wells on this land — permitted by the state’s rule of capture law, which gives landowners ownership of the groundwater beneath — collectively capable of pumping 15.9 billion gallons of groundwater each year from Anderson, Houston, and Henderson counties.
This week, a new bill introduced to the Texas state legislature aims to restrict this large scale water extraction from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer by stopping “the Neches and Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District from issuing new permits or amending existing permits to transfer water until Nov. 1, 2027,” the Tribune reports.
House Bill 27, which also requires the Texas Water Development Board to study the aquifer’s current volume of water, won unanimous approval from the House Committee on Natural Resources. During a vote on Monday, the bill won preliminary approval from the Texas House.
40
Percent of America’s groundwater used for drinking that comes from karst aquifers, composed of formations of soluble rock — such as limestone and dolomite — and thus extremely vulnerable to contamination. Such was the case for Kentucky’s Hidden River Cave, where, by the 1930s, its 10 miles of underground waterways became “hopelessly contaminated as people dumped sewage into nearby cave passages and sinkholes, not realizing they were contaminating their own water supply,” The New York Times reports. By the 1970s, the opening of a metal-plating factory nearby made the cave’s waters even worse.
But in 1989, knowing the pollution problem needed to be addressed, the town began operating a new sewage system; businesses no longer had license to dump their sewage, which inevitably seeped into the cave’s aquifer, for free. Today, the health of Hidden River Cave has significantly improved. Some 30,000 tourists visited last year, and the exploration of another 50 miles of uncharted passageways is now underway.
On the Radar
Last week, Brazil completed its first-ever energy auction in an effort to attract private investment to its national renewable power sector, Reuters reports. Generating a total of $1.5 billion, 65 hydroelectric projects — 55 small plants, eight mini projects, and two large facilities — were approved. They are expected to have a capacity of 816 megawatts and begin generating power by January 2030. The plants will be built across 13 Brazilian states.
Wetland Watch
Lake Inawashiro: Japan’s fourth-largest lake was designated on July 15 as the nation’s newest wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention, the Japan Times reports. Comprising a total of 10,960 hectares, the waterbody is a crucial winter habitat for hundreds of tundra swans.
