Global Rundown
- A new study identifies “atmospheric thirst” as a significant factor that has worsened the impacts of droughts over the past century, especially in the western United States.
- Turf-cutting — a traditional source of low-cost energy that has turned wetlands into carbon sources — is losing momentum in rural Ireland as climate awareness grows.
- A hydroelectric dam proposed for the Peruvian Amazon, once cancelled for its environmental and cultural impacts, has received renewed national interest.
- The completion of an historic landback deal in northern California has returned thousands of acres around the Klamath River to the Yurok Tribe.
The Lead
In what is the largest landback deal in California history, some 17,000 acres of the Klamath River basin have been returned to the Yurok Tribe, Grist reports.
The swath of land in northern California was among the 90 percent of the Yurok territory that had been taken when the gold rush began. The purchase — which culminates 20 years of partnership with the nonprofit Western Rivers Conservancy — is “the final parcel of a $56 million, 47,097-acre land transfer that effectively doubles the current land holdings of the Yurok Tribe.”
At the centerpiece of the parcel is the lower Blue Creek watershed, a cold-water tributary of the Klamath River. Now under the tribe’s protection, and with four dams on the lower Klamath now fully removed, there is renewed hope that the creek will once again be a haven for salmon and steelhead populations as they complete their upstream migrations.
Recent WaterNews from Circle of Blue
- New Texas Miracle — State concludes it’s running out of water.
- Trump Forces Mexico to Share More Water Along the Rio Grande — President’s stern diplomacy is criticized as temporary and damaging.
This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers
80
Percent of Ireland’s raised bogs — which formed when decaying wetland plants created peat soil in the beds of former glacial lakes — that have disappeared in recent years, compared to the country’s historic lowland landscape, Reuters reports. For years, peat has been dried and burned to create turf, an essential source of cheap fuel in rural Ireland that costs households about half as much as traditional gas or electricity. But the low-cost tradition is at odds with environmental goals, as “peat-harvesting has also destroyed precious wildlife habitats, and converted what should be natural stores for carbon dioxide into one of Ireland’s biggest emitters of planet-warming gases.” Efforts to crackdown on commercial turf-cutting and restore the wetlands to their natural state as carbon sinks have been loosely enforced, activists say, though there is momentum building — including the implementation of solar and wind power, and pressure from the European Union, in the form of billions of dollars of fines, if the country misses its 2030 carbon reduction goals.
10,000
The number of Asháninka people, Indigenous to the rainforests of Peru’s Junín region, who are estimated to be affected by the proposed construction of the Pakitzapango hydroelectric dam on the Ene River, Mongabay reports. The project was first included in 2010 as part of an energy agreement between Peru and Brazil, though plans for its construction were archived after it drew intense opposition for its environmental and cultural impacts. At 541 feet tall, the dam would be constructed in a sacred gorge that is at once the center of Amazonian peoples’ creation stories and an Asháninka burial ground. It would also flood an area of land stretching roughly 60 miles, ruining homes. Despite these concerns, earlier this year a congressman from Peru “introduced a bill that would revive the Pakitzapango project and present its construction as a matter of national interest, reigniting communities’ worries over their future.”
On the Radar
A new study published last week in the journal Nature identifies how “atmospheric thirst” — a term which describes how factors including temperature, wind, solar radiation, and humidity may accelerate the evaporation of earth’s surface water — has changed over the past century as the world warms. “It’s a complicated physical process that is hard to capture in models and, for a long time, studies of global droughts only focused on precipitation,” the New York Times reports. In nearly every region in the world, droughts over the past 100 years have become more widespread and intense. The effects of atmospheric thirst made these droughts about 40 percent worse, according to the study. Over just the past five years of the study, from 2018 to 2022, droughts were “on average 74 percent larger than in the previous four decades.” The western United States, Australia, and South America were most affected by atmospheric thirst.
In context: The Year in Water, 2024 – Risky Business
Fresh: From the Great Lakes Region
PFAS Pervasive in Great Lakes Mussels: In 106 out of 120 sampling sites across the Great Lakes, PFAS “forever chemicals” were found in mussel tissues, Bridge Michigan reports. The results were published late last year by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Sciences. The samples were taken from water bodies near the region’s wastewater treatment plants, in rivers feeding into the lakes, and across other offshore sites. Among the nearly ubiquitous positive samples, “the highest average PFAS concentration was in Lake Michigan mussels, followed by the Niagara River, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario and the Detroit River.”
Water Borrowing Boost: In a unanimous vote last week, the Wisconsin Legislature’s budget-writing committee voted to increase borrowing for the state’s revolving loan programs by $732.2 million — a move aimed “to help communities fund upgrades to water infrastructure,” Wisconsin Public Radio reports.
Bridge Michigan, Circle of Blue, Great Lakes Now at Detroit Public Television, Michigan Public and The Narwhal work together to report on the most pressing threats to the Great Lakes region’s water. This independent journalism is supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Find all the work here.
- New PFAS guidelines spark more ‘do not eat’ warnings for Michigan fish — Bridge Michigan
- Groups want Michigan officials to deny a permit for a proposed tunnel for Enbridge Line 5 — Michigan Public
- How are science and tradition saving sturgeon? — Great Lakes Now
- ‘The premier is telling untruths to First Nations’ — a turbulent week in Ontario politics — The Narwhal