Global Rundown
- Beginning in 2026, Colorado will require oil and gas developers to recycle a portion of the fresh water they use while fracking.
- Facing drought, farmers in Iraq are drilling deep wells to access groundwater — a temporary solution, they acknowledge, to an existential water shortage.
- As oil production grows in Guyana, the government is proposing a new law that would make companies liable for spills.
- Contending with saltwater intrusion, Bangladeshi farmers have successfully employed new techniques to keep their soils fertile, especially during the dry season.
The Lead
By 2050, half of the world’s arable land is predicted to be adversely affected by increased salinity, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports. This is especially true along the coastal farms of Bangladesh, where poor freshwater management, saltwater intrusion from storms and cyclones, and an overabundance of shrimp farming already contribute to salty soils. These effects are felt acutely during the dry season, when few crops have historically been able to survive saline conditions.
But since 2016, according to the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, “the amount of land brought back into production in the region during the dry season when soil salinity is highest has increased 270 percent,” eco-business reports. This success is credited to changes in farming methods: growers have switched to using salt-tolerant seeds, layering rice-straw mulch to prevent water evaporation, and digging drainage channels.
Still, climate extremes are threatening to upend this success. Erratic precipitation and heatwaves are at times proving too much for crops to withstand. The continued farming of shrimp — which includes filling ponds with saltwater — furthers the spread of saline water. In the face of these challenges, 25 million people could migrate from the coasts of Bangladesh to inland cities in the coming decades.
Recent WaterNews from Circle of Blue
- Utah’s Fluoride Ban in Drinking Water Won’t Settle Dispute on Safety — New legislation reflects influence of citizen movement to check government health directives.
- Trump’s Earth Day Purge — Two generations of public interest safeguards confront reckless policy and political test.
This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers
400
Barrels of water that can be pumped down a well on Colorado’s Front Range to crack through rock and release oil and gas — enough water, reports to Colorado Sun, to “supply 1,400 families for a year.” Beginning in 2026, the state will require companies producing oil and gas to recycle four percent of the fresh water they use for fracking. This figure may rise to 35 percent, or even higher, when standards are reassessed by the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) in 2028. Between 2011 and 2020, just 1.7 percent of the state’s fresh water usage was consumed by fracking. “But I think each sector has to look at ways to develop conservation measures, and I think this is a good step and an achievable step for the oil and gas industry,” John Messner, commissioner of the ECMC, told the Sun. The rule will be felt most acutely in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, where fracking operations currently consume “90 percent of the freshwater used in fracking in Colorado, but recycles less than 1% of its produced water.”
In context: Permian Oil Boom Uncorks Multibillion-Dollar Water Play
900,000
Barrels of oil Guyana expects to produce per day by the end of the year, Reuters reports. The country’s increase in production has been steady, and last year it became Latin America’s fifth-largest oil exporter. But Guyana is also more than 80 percent forested, and takes pride in protecting its standing as one of the world’s few net-zero carbon emissions countries. To “reinforce oversight of its nascent energy industry,” its government has proposed a new bill that “would make responsible parties liable for damages caused by oil spills, including from vessels.”
On the Radar
Wheat farmers in Iraq, tired of enduring prolonged drought conditions that threaten their livelihood, are choosing to drill wells some 300 meters deep to access the groundwater reserves their crops need, France24 reports. The decision has proved successful in the short term, and desert farming has even expanded in certain parts of the country, such as the city of Najaf. This past winter, 3.1 million dunums (766,000 acres) of farmland was cultivated using groundwater and irrigation, while only 2 million dunums (494,210 acres) were cultivated with river water. But even though many farmers are employing smart irrigation techniques, they understand that heavy groundwater extraction is only a temporary solution. Even more concerning is that scientists are flying blind — the most recent data on the nation’s groundwater quantities dates back to the 1970s.
Fresh: From the Great Lakes Region
Flint Water Settlement: The environmental consulting company Veolia North America, following a federal judge’s ruling, will pay a $53 million settlement to 26,000 Michigan residents “who were directly impacted by the lead-tainted water” during Flint’s water crisis 10 years ago, the Michigan Advance reports. The state of Michigan and the plaintiffs successfully claimed that the company “did not do enough to get Flint to treat its water so that it would be less corrosive inside the city’s lead pipes.”
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.
- What Carney’s win means for environment and climate issues in Canada – The Narwhal
- More Fire, More Water – Great Lakes Now
- Study: Washing machines send ‘toxic stew’ of microfibers into Great Lakes – Bridge Michigan
- Great Lakes research at risk as Trump administration proposes major cuts to NOAA – Michigan Public