Global Rundown
- Rainmakers in South Sudan, responsible for bringing reliable precipitation, are being killed for perceived failure as drought attributed to climate change becomes widespread.
- Albania’s government has pledged to clean the sewage and landfill pollution plaguing the Vjosa River Valley, a newly designated UNESCO biosphere.
- Officials in Kenya have shortlisted three sites, including the shores of Lake Victoria, for a new 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant.
- Humans, fish, and rivers in the Peruvian Amazon are becoming increasingly contaminated with unsafe levels of mercury as illegal gold mining booms.
The Lead
The Kenyan government has identified three possible locations on which to build a $3.8 billion, 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant. Luanda Kotieno, a coastal town on the eastern shores of Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest freshwater lake, is one of the sites being considered.
For environmentalists and those living along these shores, news of the plant’s potential construction has brought unease. Some 800,000 metric tons of fish are caught in the lake each year, raising concerns about the fishery’s health — and economic impacts, by extension — should nuclear waste or other pollution seep into the water body. Lake Victoria is also the headwaters of the White Nile, one of two major tributaries of the Nile, the world’s longest river. Countries downstream of the Lake Victoria-White Nile confluence that rely on this water for drinking and irrigation include Uganda, South Sudan, Sudan, and Egypt.
Mongabay reports that residents in the proposed locations have expressed concerns about a lack of communication and transparency from the government, including on how nuclear waste will be regulated and managed.
Recent WaterNews from Circle of Blue
- A World on Fire Is a Water Risk — Bigger, hotter fires harm ecosystems, infrastructure.
- “America First” Puts Big Hurt on International Water Programs — Influenced by the close of U.S.A.I.D, millions overseas are thirsty, while farm markets at home close.
This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers
85
Percent of South Sudan that is reliant on subsistence agriculture for food. As such, rainmakers — those whose job it is to summon rain for growers and pastoralists — are some of the most revered village figures. At the beginning of the growing season, the rituals they perform, it is believed, are directly responsible for the health and agricultural success of their neighbors.
But in a country ravaged by climate extremes, warming, and drought have upended normal growing seasons. Widespread famine and economic losses have taken hold. Many have looked upon rainmakers with suspicious eyes, claiming they are not fulfilling the duty bestowed upon them. In recent years, Al Jazeera reports, these misgivings have turned violent. Over the last four decades in South Sudan’s Lopit mountains alone, at least six rainmakers have been killed. Several others have been killed across Eastern Equatoria state, and an unknown number are now on the run.
80
Percent of residents living in villages along the Amazon River in Peru whose hair samples show levels of mercury above safe limits as defined by the World Health Organization, the Associated Press reports. The source of this chemical pollution is gold mining, which has become more rampant in the world’s largest rainforest with the global price per ounce expected to surge to nearly $4,000 by next year. Endemic fish, including the endangered pink river dolphin, have also been analyzed and shown with elevated mercury levels.
This week at an Amazon Water Summit, Miguel Ángel Cadenas, a Catholic leader in Peru, urged countries to take action in the Tigre, Nanay, Napo, and Putumayo rivers, all of which are at-risk of further mercury contamination.
On the Radar
In Albania’s Vjosa valley, a national park and newly designated UNESCO biosphere, recognition granted on paper is not translating to the land. Plastic litter and sewage leaches from an open landfill into the Vjosa River, one of the last uninterrupted waterways in Europe, Reuters reports. Gravel diggers use sediment from the riverbed to make concrete. Elsewhere along its banks, oil wells and bitumen pits threaten the otters, Egyptian vultures, and rare plants that make homes in this riparian ecosystem. In an interview with the outlet, Albania’s Environment Minister Sofjan Jaupaj pledged at least 150 million euros to treat the sewage water and close all landfills, though many residents fear the river’s ecological integrity is forever lost.
Wetland Watch
National Association of Wetland Managers: The nonprofit and nonpartisan national organization that supports state and tribal wetland programs across the U.S. will not have its $1.2 million annual cooperative agreement with the EPA renewed, E&E News reports, after the agency declined to continue its decade-long partnership.
