Global Rundown
- Denmark’s pig industry has contributed to the contamination of a majority of the country’s wells, placing water at the center of recent prime minister elections.
- A massive water treatment plant planned for Boise, Idaho, to mitigate the impacts of drought and development has been paused.
- A new study estimates that the filling of U.S. wetlands since 1985 has led to $10 billion in flood insurance claims.
- Groundwater pumping and irrigation in the U.S. Corn Belt is contributing to stronger, longer thunderstorms in the region.
The Lead
The results of Denmark’s tightly contested prime minister’s race — a contest known as the ‘Pig Elections’ and which concluded last week — is being celebrated by environmental advocates as a win for both the country’s numerous pigs and the health of its groundwater sources.
Ahead of the election —which incumbent Mette Frederiksen won — roughly 53 percent of voting Danes said that pigs’ quality of life influenced their vote, while 95 percent called for more action to protect the country’s groundwater and drinking water sources.
Denmark is world-famous for its pork. One of the country’s most iconic industries, pork production accounts for almost half of agricultural exports. More pigs (13 million) live in Denmark than people (6 million), and an estimated 30 million pigs are born each year, compared to 60,000 human babies.
Intensive global demand for Danish pig meat has driven many farms to engage in competitive breeding practices that often place animal welfare second to production — some 25,000 pigs die a day, often in tight pens, the Guardian reports, and sows wean significantly more piglets per year compared to any other pig-producing country.
Concerns for pigs’ rights resonated across the country ahead of this month’s election, though outcry over water resources resounded even louder. Roughly one-quarter of all land in Denmark is used to produce feed for pigs. Toxic pesticides, including nitrates, used to grow these crops are present in 56 percent of the country’s drinking water wells. The situation is particularly dire in Aalborg in northern Denmark, which is known as the country’s “nitrate belt.”
“The municipality took the Danish government to court in February over nitrate levels in its surface and groundwater that have exceeded legal limits for decades,” according to the Guardian.
Per a Greenpeace analysis, Danish taxpayers have been forced to pay $100 million in efforts to clean contaminated sources of drinking water.
In Context: Spain’s Hog Haven Pollutes Catalonian Waters
Recent WaterNews from Circle of Blue
- Illinois Fails to Pass Landmark Act Requiring ‘Responsible’ Data Center Energy and Water Use — The bill proposed mandatory water use reports at data centers and the facilities that powered them.
- Hoover Dam Approaches a Hydropower Cliff — Big cuts in generating capacity are coming.
This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers
$10 billion
A study published last week in the journal Nature Water and authored by Environmental Defense Fund researchers calculates that since 1985, the loss of wetlands across the United States has increased flood insurance claims from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) by $10 billion.
“Our findings show that wetlands are a form of natural infrastructure that reduces flood damage, and that losing them has created real costs for households and communities,” Jesse Gourevitch, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “This research can help state and federal decision-makers better account for the value of wetlands in land use policy, benefit-cost analysis and flood insurance.”
Known as “nature’s sponge,” wetlands act as a natural sink for excess water that collects after periods of serious rainfall, river overflows, or rapid snowmelt. They also help improve water quality — often filtering water that runs off from farmland or industrial sites — offer habitat for species, and store carbon.
The $10 billion figure is a conservative calculation of wetlands’ value in the United States. Because the federal NFIP only fulfills about 30 percent of the claims it receives, the total costs of these ecosystems’ decline since 1985, the researchers say, may well exceed $33 billion in property damages.
The study identified the Houston metropolitan area, southeastern Louisiana, and coastal Florida as the communities where the cost of claims have increased the most. Flood-prone areas including Kentucky, Virginia, and Pennsylvania were listed as hotspots where “reducing further loss through wetland protection would help avoid dramatic increases in damage costs in the future.”
In the top 10 percent of flood-prone sub-watersheds, the researchers calculate, every hectare of wetlands provides more than $24,000 in residential flood risk reduction value. In the top 1 percent of flood-prone sub-watersheds, these values exceed $300,000 per hectare.
In Context: The Next Deluge May Go Differently and Eastern Kentucky Floods Continue Cycle of Poverty
On the Radar
Computer models developed by researchers at the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research suggest that shallow groundwater reservoirs and irrigation systems across America’s Corn Belt — which includes parts of Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio — increase the frequency and duration of the region’s thunderstorms.
The water-crop-storm connection is a complex one, scientists say. The Corn Belt has become more humid and wet in recent years, a trend that new simulations show is due in part to the movement of moisture from below ground to Earth’s surface, largely from farm irrigation. The release of water vapor from the surface then amplifies atmospheric updrafts and fuels heavy rains.
This has important consequences for the region’s precipitation. Large thunderstorm complexes — called mesoscale convective systems — are forming between 24 percent and 35 percent faster than usual, and they are lasting 10 percent longer. These storms provide between 40 percent and 60 percent of the growing season’s rain in the Corn Belt, and their growing strength puts communities at risk of flooding, tornadoes, and hail damage.
In April, separate modeling suggested that flood-induced crop losses were likely to be more impactful than drought-induced crop losses across the American Midwest under high-emissions climate scenarios.
Infrastructure Insight
Due to rising costs, officials in Boise, Idaho, have indefinitely paused plans to build a $750 million water treatment facility that would have alleviated water scarcity concerns amid periods of drought and projected population growth, KTVB 7 reports.
The 76-acre facility would have treated 6 million gallons of industrial wastewater daily, selling much of this volume to businesses while also recharging Boise’s aquifer. Roughly 70 percent of the city gets its water from the aquifer, where water levels have declined in recent decades due to below-average precipitation, hotter temperatures, and agricultural withdrawals.
Originally planned to be brought online by the early 2030s, the project was cancelled due to rising construction and labor costs. Residents remain concerned about their long-term water security and the health of the Boise River, into which 30 million gallons of treated wastewater are released daily.
“Pausing this recycled water project is disappointing for our team and our community, who continue to show their support for protecting our local water resources,” Boise Public Works Director Steve Burgos said in a statement. “We’re focused on keeping our rates affordable while continuing to invest in keeping our city and the Boise River clean, safe and healthy.”
As of June 8, more than 85 percent of Idaho is experiencing drought conditions. The greater Boise area is categorized by the U.S. Drought Monitor as “abnormally dry” for this time of year, with neighboring counties in moderate and severe drought.
